“Exile of the World”: Israeli Perceptions of Jacobo Timerman Raanan Rein and Efraim Davidi A bstr act Upon his arrival in Israel in September 1979, the Jewish-Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman was welcomed as a Jewish hero. The founding editor of the daily La Opinión had been kidnapped in Argentina in April 1977, tortured, and had spent almost two and a half years in illegal detention, and later house arrest, until he was deported to Israel. But the initial enthusiasm quickly gave way to disappointment. The Jewish hero became a persona non grata, among other reasons because of his critical writings against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This article analyzes the changing image of Timerman in the Hebrew press. Israeli society found it difficult to accept such criticism from someone who had come to Israel only a short time earlier and, moreover, with the help of the Israeli government. The hostility toward Timerman also reflected a lack of understanding as to the meaning of Zionism among many Diaspora Jews. Key words: Jacobo Timerman, Israeli-Argentine relations, diplomacy and human rights, Zionism
O
n May 25, 1977, a day when Argentina was celebrating the anniversary of the formation of its first native government, the ruling military regime decided to appoint a general as interventor (a government-appointed supervisor) at one of the most influential newspapers in the country, La Opinión. This daily, known as “the Le Monde of Latin America,” had been founded six years earlier by the Jewish-Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman (1923–99). From its inception, La Opinión had a revolutionary impact on the Argentine news scene. Like the French daily to which it was compared, it focused on cultural issues, political analysis, and international
Raanan Rein and Efraim Davidi, “ ‘Exile of the World’: Israeli Perceptions of Jacobo Timerman,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 16, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2010): 1–31
[2] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
news, besides chronicling events. When the military junta appointed General José Teófilo Goyret to manage it, the paper’s founder and editor was already a prisoner—or, rather, he had been kidnapped on April 15 of that year, and his whereabouts were unknown. One of the most famous journalists of the country was sharing the fate of thousands of young people who had been arrested and were now missing (desaparecidos). Almost all of them were tortured, and many of them were killed. The coup d’état carried out by the Argentine military officers on March 24, 1976, was the sixth the country had undergone since 1930. However, this latest Argentine dictatorship was notable for a repression unprecedented in the nation’s history. In the name of the Doctrine of National Security and the battle against subversion, thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. What was officially known as the “Process of National Reorganization” was thereafter known around the world as “the dirty war.”1 Timerman had been illegally imprisoned since mid-April 1977; his situation was “whitewashed” (regularized) in expectation of a military court trial, at which he was acquitted in October of that same year. Despite this ruling, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces thought it imperative to keep him in prison for offenses against the Statute for the Process of National Reorganization, such as “failure to observe basic moral principles in the exercise of public, political, or union offices.” Consequently, he remained under arrest for another two years—most of the time in his own home on Ayacucho Street in Buenos Aires— until September 25, 1979. The day he was released—without any prior notice—he was told that his Argentine citizenship had been revoked, and he was put on a commercial flight to Madrid en route to Israel. In total, counting prison stays and house arrest, Timerman had been deprived of his freedom for some 30 months. He described his experiences in a book written while in exile in Israel, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, which became an international bestseller.2 Timerman had maintained extensive relations with the State of Israel and its representatives in Argentina in the years before his kidnapping, and in this article we examine the internal disputes that took place in the upper echelons of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem and the Israeli government over the Timerman case as well as the dilemmas that his imprisonment created for both the State of Israel and Jewish community institutions in Argentina. However, the main issue addressed here is the way the Israeli press treated this famous prisoner, who was also the journalist with the closest ties to Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires. We analyze the drastic transformation in
the image of a man who was considered a Jewish hero at the time he was deported to Israel but who had become almost persona non grata by the time he left the country some four years later—among other reasons, for his fierce criticisms of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s. This discussion should be understood in the wider context of the ways in which different elements within Israel and within the Jewish Diaspora interacted and came into conflict over the fate of Timerman and other political prisoners; in turn, all of this must be viewed against the backdrop of the Cold War/Dirty War period during the 1970s in Latin America. The way the Israeli establishment and the Hebrew press treated Timerman is very important, since it is connected to several key issues in the Jewish state’s relations with the Diaspora communities in general and the Israel–Argentina–Argentine Jews triangle in particular. Although the State of Israel has, since its declaration of independence, defined itself as a “Jewish state,” underlining its commitment to defending the interests of Jews everywhere, the country’s foreignpolicy interests have not always coincided with those of Jewish communities, groups, or individuals. In many cases, decision makers and journalists in Israel have taken an expedient approach toward the Jews of the Diaspora, turning away from those whose activities or views were not compatible with the Zionist discourse.3 In Timerman’s case, the Israeli assistance he received was attributable precisely to his status as a “prisoner with a name, in a cell with a number,” since the Israeli official establishment did not extend this assistance to hundreds of other “disappeared” Jews, who truly were without names and without cell numbers.4 Yet the support for Timerman and identification with him lasted only as long as his views and struggles could be integrated with the views and self-image of the State of Israel. When they deviated from the accepted patterns, whether because Timerman’s Argentine identity was no less influential than his Zionist identity or because as a Diaspora Jew he dared to criticize the government’s policy, his public image in Israel underwent a reversal. Merciless Interrogations and Antisemitic Stereotypes In his testimony before the members of CONADEP (the Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, formed after the collapse of the dictatorship to investigate its crimes), 5 Timerman described the events that began with his arrest at home in Buenos Aires early on the morning of April 15, 1977:
[3] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[4] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
After arresting me at my home in the federal capital, they took me to the police headquarters of Buenos Aires Province where I was interrogated by Camps and Etchecolatz; from there they transferred me to Campo de Mayo, where they made me sign a statement. Then they left me at Puesto Vasco, where I was tortured, after which I was again turned over to the Central Department of the Federal Police, where after 25 days I was able to get in touch with my family. From there they took me to COT-I Martínez to be tortured again, then again to the Central Department of the Federal Police. Ultimately, I was legally interned at the Magdalena penitentiary.6
Once his arrest had become public knowledge, Timerman was the most famous Argentine political prisoner both inside and outside of the country. The journalist described his interrogators as antisemitic, anti-Marxist extremists who insisted that “Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.” 7 Timerman stressed that the issue of his Judaism came up repeatedly during every interrogation, which included questions about Israeli schemes to send military forces to Argentina in order to implement the “Andinia Plan,” an apocryphal Zionist conspiracy to occupy a broad section of the Patagonian provinces in southern Argentina and establish a second Jewish state there.8 Another prisoner, Juan Ramón Nazar, confirmed that his captors held firm antisemitic views and that they continually demanded details about the Andinia Plan.9 Timerman’s account is further bolstered by a telegram sent by the Israeli ambassador in Argentina, Ram Nirgad, to his supervisors in Jerusalem in May 1978: The struggle against clandestine subversive groups was waged and is waged furiously, and the measures taken are brutal and cruel. . . . Some of the Jews who were victims of the actions against clandestine groups suffered extra for being Jews. There are also antisemitic tendencies in the investigations that were aimed at Jewish and Zionist organizations.10
Ramón Camps—then chief of police of Buenos Aires province and a colonel, though he later became a general—published a book in 1982 in response to that of the journalist whom he had held in detention: Jacobo Timerman tried, from [the grandstand of] La Opinión, to raise revolutionary consciousness . . . to reformulate, or, if you will, to empty the national traditions for the benefit of Marxism, of which he claimed
to be the champion. . . . [W]hile he was convincing successive governments, civilian or military, of his adherence to the ruling party in those pages of La Opinión devoted to the analysis of national policy, he was destroying the bases of society in the [newspaper’s] cultural supplements and section on international politics. . . . [U]ltimately, since Marxism is the heresy of modern times, what we are seeing is the current chapter of that constant war between Good and Evil.11
Under interrogation, Timerman was repeatedly questioned about the nature of his relations with David Graiver, one of La Opinión’s principal shareholders, who had been killed a few months earlier in an airplane accident in Mexico. Graiver, a young businessman from La Plata, had built a small international economic empire that, it was discovered after his death, had been financed with ransom money collected by the banned guerrilla organization Montoneros.12 Ultranationalist factions inside and outside the armed forces considered the link between the ill-fated banker and the journalist as confirmation of their working hypothesis about a Jewish-Zionist-Marxist conspiracy against the country.13 Timerman maintained close relations with high-ranking military officers. He even considered some of them to be personal friends rather than merely work contacts. Accordingly, the question arises as to whether Timerman—who had supported the coup d’état that overthrew the Peronist government in March 1976 in the hope that it would restore confidence in the national institutions14 —was a victim of internal struggles between different groups in the armed forces competing for control of the regime, or whether he was arrested because of the intrinsic antisemitism of the military command. In addition, some commentators have suggested that, in the year since the coup, the generals had come to consider their former friend to be their most dangerous enemy and to believe that it was imperative to neutralize the only newspaper publishing news about what went on in government circles. Answers to these questions, however, are beyond the scope of this article. Antisemitic, Pro-Israeli Generals In 1978, on the eve of the World Cup soccer championship in Argentina, the monstrous dimensions of the state’s terrorism had already aroused international criticism against the Argentine government. The U.S. government, under the Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter, adopted a firm policy against the mass violation
[5] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[6] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
of human rights in Argentina. This was a reversal of the line taken by the previous Republican administration, which, as the declassification of additional government documents in the United States revealed, not only had given a green light to the repression but had gone so far as to urge the leaders of the military junta to complete the job as soon as possible, before U.S. public opinion got in the way.15 The State of Israel maintained close relations with the military dictatorship in Argentina. Despite the antisemitic attitudes of the junta, relations between the two countries flourished in those days, first during the government of Labour Party leader Yitzhak Rabin and subsequently under the administration of Menachem Begin and the Likud Party, following their electoral victory in May 1977.16 In September 1976, only a few months after the coup, the foreign ministers of both countries had met in New York, in an atmosphere described as “cordial.” According to a report sent to the ministry in Jerusalem, Israeli foreign minister Yigal Allon talked about the mutual interest of our countries in the face of Soviet imperialism and invited his colleague to visit Israel. He added that the Argentine minister of foreign relations [Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti] would be able to see the whole country, from the Holy Places to the arms produced in Israel, including better and more affordable types of arms than [those] produced in other countries, and also others designed for the war against terrorism, such as the “Galil.”17
However, news about relations between Israel and Argentina, especially military relations, was scrutinized by the censor’s watchful eye. The censor’s office, which answered to the Israel Defense Forces, prohibited virtually any publication in which arms transactions with another country were mentioned. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the situation in the remote South American republic passed under the radar of Israeli public opinion. As for the Israeli parliament’s approach to Argentine-Israeli relations, former minister Shulamit Aloni published an article in Ha-’arets on what happened when she tried to initiate a parliamentary debate on Israeli arms sales to the Argentine military regime: At the time not only did they shut me up, but the late Knesset member Yigal Horowitz threatened me personally and ordered me not to open my mouth. This was at a time when the Israeli government was delivering arms to the brutal Argentine military regime that was exterminating citizens right and left. On the fifth floor of the Knesset, the parents of children who had disappeared came asking us to do something. I sub-
mitted a motion for the Knesset agenda to discuss the issue. It was refused. I was told that this subject could not be debated in the Knesset but that it would be discussed in the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee. As far as I know, the subject was never debated, since if it had been they would have invited me.18
According to a special report published by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales of the DAIA (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas de Argentina, the umbrella organization that represents the Jewish community in Argentina), close to 1,300 Jews disappeared during the military regime—a number disproportionate to their representation in the general population of the country.19 Relatives in Israel of desaparecidos and political prisoners in Argentina appealed to anyone who might be able to intercede on behalf of their loved ones: government officials, diplomats, businessmen, journalists, politicians, army officers. The interministerial commission created in Israel two decades later to investigate the fate of the Jewish desaparecidos emphasized in its report: The families felt that their interests were not being treated effectively enough, that time was passing, and that there was no help or information at all. . . . Seeking to pool their efforts and exert a more efficient influence, a group of families created the “Committee of Relatives of Desaparecidos in Argentina,” an organization that called for active intervention from the State of Israel. Among other things, the relatives’ committee appealed to various Knesset members, asking them to intervene. Some of them, from a range of political factions, indicated their willingness to collaborate, but efforts to put the topic on the Knesset agenda were in vain. The speaker of the Knesset, Menachem Savidor, would not allow it to be discussed by the plenum. After many unanswered requests to the Knesset Secretariat, the Committee of Relatives decided to appeal to the Supreme Court. This impelled the Knesset plenum to discuss the subject [in late June 1983] in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s deliberations, and a parliamentary commission went to Argentina for the first time to study the issue. However, after two days in Argentina, the commission cut short its mission and returned home early to participate in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in the government. The trip produced no results. This incident reinforced still further the relatives’ conviction that no clear policy existed. . . . [A]s far as the families knew, the government never discussed the problem of the desaparecidos in any organized, institutionalized manner as an important item on the national agenda.20
Despite the censor’s best efforts, the close relations that Israel and the Argentine military regime had developed in the field of arms
[7] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[8] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
sales were an open secret. According to the interministerial commission’s report, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was responsible for developing trade relations between the two countries and especially for promoting Israeli exports. The ambassador was not directly involved in contracting for the various military equipment sales and training courses in the use of that equipment. Such matters were handled by military attachés and representatives of the Israeli companies involved. However, the ambassador did “actively participate in the general promotion [of trade with Argentina] and in strengthening relations with the agents who made the purchase decisions.” 21 The ambiguous wording of this report seems to confirm that Israel was indeed supplying military equipment and that Israeli military officers were training their Argentine peers (both in Argentina and in Israel). Moreover, the embassy was aware of these exchanges—to the extent that, on some occasions, the ambassador himself undertook to promote business, taking advantage of his access to “the agents who made the purchase decisions,” who were none other than the senior officers responsible for Argentina’s systematic human-rights violations. A letter entitled “Sale of Arms to Argentina and Chile,” sent by diplomat Dov Schmorack to the director-general of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on July 5, 1978, listed articles that Israel was selling to the two neighboring dictatorships as they squared off against each other.22 While successive Israeli governments were providing military and political support to the junta, the Jewish Agency was making efforts (together with the Israeli ministries of foreign affairs, the interior, and absorption) to rescue victims of political persecution from Argentina. These individuals, almost all of them of Jewish origin, did not arrive in Israel as refugees or petitioners for political asylum but by virtue of the Law of Return. As a result, it is difficult to determine their number, since on paper they are indistinguishable from all the other immigrants from Argentina in those years. One estimate suggests that, from the end of 1975 (before the coup d’état but at a time when death squads were already at work under government protection) up to mid-1978 (when the World Cup soccer tournament took place), several hundred Argentine exiles arrived, fleeing the horror of persecution by the de facto government. Yet many of them had been estranged from Jewish community life and had no connection with Zionism, so within a few years most of these immigrants abandoned Israel (usually for Western Europe, especially Spain and France), and others returned to Argentina when the dictatorship ended in 1983.23 These exiles, together with young Argentines who had emigrated in the early 1970s through Zionist youth movements and a small number of left-wing Israelis, were the
main participants in the actions organized in Israel against the Argentine military regime.24 The Most Famous Prisoner Timerman, however, was a different case entirely. He was not simply one among thousands of detainees, prisoners, and desaparecidos but was the symbol of resistance to Argentina’s brutal dictatorship and a human-rights advocate. Agitation, public and otherwise, for his liberation never ceased throughout the 30 months of his captivity. After the fact, the State of Israel attempted on occasion to claim the starring role in the campaign for the journalist’s release, but in fact pressure was brought to bear by embassies of various countries, governments (primarily the Carter administration in the United States and its assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, Patricia Derian), international organizations (such as Amnesty International), and Jewish organizations outside the Argentine orbit. In the difficult conditions imposed by the state repression, very few local bodies worked for the release of political prisoners. Of all Argentinian news papers, only the English-language daily, the Buenos Aires Herald, published the news of Timerman’s arrest in April 1977 and described it as “a blow to freedom of the press.” Timerman and the editors of the Herald, Robert Cox and Andrew Graham-Yooll, were among the few journalists who criticized the government for the systematic violation of human rights.25 Cox, too, was eventually arrested and went into exile in December 1979, shortly after Timerman arrived in Israel.26 From the day that the editor of La Opinión was arrested, Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires and the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem sought ways to intervene, even though officially the Jewish state showed no interest in the Timerman case, at least publicly. But far from the media spotlight, the embassy staff—particularly Ram Nirgad, who maintained close ties with the Argentine leadership—followed the case’s development closely and made efforts to obtain Timerman’s release. On the one hand, mostly government-owned Israeli companies were negotiating big arms sales to Argentina, information about which leaked out to the international press; on the other, the state and its representatives in Argentina had to confront the necessity of doing something about the fate of the disappeared Jews in general and of Timerman in particular. Timerman’s connection with the Israeli establishment had begun back in the 1950s. A former member of the Ha-shomer Ha-tsa‘ir
[9] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[10] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
youth movement who always defined himself as a “socialist Zionist,” he strengthened his ties with Israeli representatives in the 1960s, once he began managing major weeklies such as Primera Plana and Confirmado and especially after he founded the daily La Opinión. This newspaper, which enjoyed great influence among intellectuals and enormous prestige in Latin America in general, devoted a significant amount of space to international affairs, unlike the “traditional” Argentine press, which considered foreign events to be of rather marginal interest. During its first six years of existence, La Opinión focused considerable attention on events in the Middle East. Its sources were primarily the press agencies and their correspondents; on occasion, its articles openly reflected “explanatory” material distributed by the Israeli embassy.27 Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that, in the frequent messages sent by the diplomatic legation back to the ministry in Jerusalem after Timerman’s arrest, the “most famous prisoner” was referred to by the nickname “the old friend.” Joel Barromi, a high-ranking diplomat, defined Timerman’s relations with Israel in this manner: Timerman maintained close contact with the embassy. Thanks to his knowledge of the ins and outs of the Argentine political-military world, he was a valuable source of information and analysis, and an advisor whose counsel was reliable and correct. Timerman also imbued his daily [newspaper] with open support for Israel and Zionism. In 1975, when the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism, Timerman published a signed editorial entitled “Why I Am a Zionist,” which made a considerable impact. Naturally, the news of his arrest produced shock and amazement at the embassy and indignation in Israel.28
Nevertheless, Timerman was unaware of the network of relations between Israel’s representatives and the officers who had carried out the coup. In a telegram sent to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem in early April 1976, on the eve of a meeting with the junta’s foreign minister, a navy officer, and less than two weeks after the coup, Nirgad said emphatically, “As you know, I have maintained close ties with the naval leadership for more than a year, and I don’t think we need to involve Timerman in this matter.” 29 Timerman’s arrest also caused a stir in the Jewish-Argentine establishment, particularly the DAIA. Although Timerman had many rivals among the community leaders, several considered themselves his friends. But the institutions as such said hardly a word in public on the subject. Finally, in April 1978, the president of the DAIA, Nehemías Reznitsky, asked the executive board of the organization to issue a com-
muniqué expressing approval of the decision to move Timerman to house arrest.30 José Timerman, Jacobo’s brother, said years later: The Jewish organizations took a passive approach, which amazed me, considering Jacobo’s systematic struggle against antisemitism and what happened during the Holocaust and so many other massacres suffered by the Jewish people throughout their history. I remember once I had a two-hour-long meeting with the executive board of the DAIA to ask it to undertake some kind of action in defense of my brother. But it was useless.31
The contradictory tangle of considerations with which the State of Israel approached the Timerman case included concerns for Timerman’s personal safety, for the position of the Jewish-Argentine community establishment, for the politics of the Jewish organizations around the world that were beginning to take an interest in the subject, for the continuation of Israel’s arms sales, and for the excellent relations already established with the governing military leadership. The interest that Israel and its diplomatic representatives took in Timerman’s fate was reflected in hundreds of documents, messages, and telegrams exchanged during those months between the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem and the embassy in Buenos Aires about the legal status and health of the editor of La Opinión and the efforts being made to obtain his release.32 Israel’s official policy can be described as an effort to show the junta that it had committed a serious error in arresting the journalist but to avoid rousing international public opinion against the regime and, even more important, to avoid attributing antisemitic proclivities to the leaders of the dictatorship. Secrecy and discretion were essential in the course of action adopted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry (contrasting notably with, of course, the vocal campaign Israel promoted on behalf of the Jews of the Soviet Union). The Israeli press scarcely mentioned the topic. Timerman’s arrest was hardly publicized, and little was said about the situation of Jews under the repressive Argentine government. What Should Be Done about Timerman? The exchange of telexes, telegrams, and letters between Nirgad and Yishayahu Anug, then director-general of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, testify to the great confusion reigning at the time. However, Timerman was not “a main axis of our diplomatic policy” with Argen-
[11] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[12] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
tina, as Anug wrote to the embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1978. The inner workings of the foreign service and national security bureaucracies are of utmost importance here. It should be noted that Anug played a central role in shaping Israel’s policy toward Argentina in those months, or, as he told us without much modesty, “the Ministry—and I say this without the slightest arrogance—the Ministry was Anug at that time.”33 Under pressure from the military industry and national security apparatus, Anug in Jerusalem and Nirgad in Buenos Aires seemed to be the key figures in determining Israeli policies toward the Argentine junta. However, each of them enjoyed only a limited degree of autonomy. As Anug also explained: The fact [that we are] continuing business as usual and even expanding it contradicts this statement [that Timerman was “a main axis of our diplomatic policy” with Argentina]. I would say not that Timerman is crucial for us but rather that we are crucial for his release. It is not an emotional issue but one of cool judgment. The formula consists in creating the sense that his release is vital for Argentina’s image and also for Israel and the positive development of our relations with them. . . . [A]ll [you] need do is keep sending memos to [President Jorge Rafael] Videla and others in whatever way seems best to you. The list of dignitaries from Israel who have visited [Argentina] is impressive (by the way, I was informed about the [Israel] Bonds that you requested from [ex–chief of staff Mordechai] Gur) and we do not want to, nor can we, intervene or reduce it.34
The “cool judgment” to which Anug referred meant perceiving Israel’s national interests—as defined by the thinking of the Israeli establishment—in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Cold War, and the difficulties that the State of Israel faced in the international arena. Herzl Inbar, the minister counselor who remained provisionally in charge of the Israeli embassy for a few months as Nirgad’s replacement, sought an explanation for the military leadership’s stubborn refusal to release Timerman. To that end, he invited Hugo Ezequiel Lezama, editor of the daily Convicción, to his home in Buenos Aires. Lezama had supported the military coup, and, according to Inbar, He is considered the ghost writer of the ex-commander of the Navy [Emilio Eduardo] Massera, and his daily paper is the newsletter of the naval ex-head. Lezama said almost word for word that the current government, without exception, is a bunch of thugs who care nothing for human life. He maintained that the highest ranking officers in the three armed services, as well as in the police and the gendarmerie, carry
out assassination orders with incredible ease. . . . [E]ach commander is lord of his sector and uses his authority and the means at his disposal to accumulate positions of power. As an example, [Lezama] cited the name of a colonel who in due course seized a journalist who had disappeared. The U.S. secretary of state, on a visit here, inquired into the fate of the journalist, and Videla promised assistance. The colonel, hearing about this, agreed to hand over the journalist only in return for a promotion to general, and that rank was conferred upon him. . . . [Lezama said] last night that, as the editor of a daily, he finds himself forced to lie a hundred times a day, and he is suffering a personal dilemma as to how far he can yield without being considered in the future a “collaborator” with a Nazi regime.35
Despite the meetings between Videla and Nirgad at which the subject of Timerman, among others, came up, by the end of 1977 the Israeli Foreign Ministry could already see clearly that it would not be able to obtain the release of the former editor of La Opinión amicably—that is, by trying to soften the hearts of the military regime leaders. It would therefore have to adopt some other course of action. And this plan, which Anug communicated to the Israeli ambassadors in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Rome, Bern, The Hague, and Brussels, was charted in detail. It was a confidential plan that required the ambassadors to urge conservative “friends of Israel,” especially Western editors and journalists, to pressure the junta in Buenos Aires. “Conservative” in this case meant anticommunist: people whose criticisms could not be dismissed by the Argentine dictatorship as Soviet propaganda.36 A letter sent by Anug on January 10, 1978, to the ambassadors emphasized that they should not accuse the junta of having adopted antisemitic positions, involve leftists in this activity, or join the international campaign against the Argentine dictatorship. They should act discreetly, at most publishing personal columns in major dailies. The plan did not achieve the desired results. Anug wrote once more to the Israeli ambassadors in Western Europe and the United States, in November 1978, giving them a list of prominent personalities with conservative tendencies who could sign a public petition calling for Timerman’s release and even create an international committee for that purpose. As it turned out, the idea of the committee did not get very far before Timerman was expelled from Argentina in 1979. In August 1979, when Nirgad began making the usual formal goodbyes preparatory to leaving his post, he was interviewed by the Argentine press. He maintained that the Timerman case had nothing to do with relations between the two countries and that the journalist
[13] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[14] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
could settle in Israel like any other Jew. He also said that Timerman “should be set free.” This statement greatly displeased the military authorities, who formally protested what they considered interference in Argentine internal affairs. On September 19, after the second habeas corpus petition had been brought on Timerman’s behalf, the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice ruled that he should be released without delay. The following night, the government leaders met in secret to discuss Timerman’s future. Most of the generals opposed his release, but Videla himself, the justice minister, and the entire Supreme Court threatened to resign if the legal ruling was not obeyed.37 The minister’s threat decided the question in favor of Timerman’s release, and the next day Inbar was summoned to confirm that Israel was indeed willing to receive the journalist and to give him a safe-conduct and entry visa, since the Argentine government planned to strip him of his Argentine citizenship. On September 25, an affirmative response was received from the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. Three days later, Timerman landed at Tel Aviv’s international airport. Two weeks thereafter, Nissim Elnecavé, editor of the Jewish weekly La Luz—identified with the conservative rightwing sectors of the Argentine Jewish community—published an editorial in which he claimed that the reason Timerman had been imprisoned was neither because he was Jewish nor because he was a journalist. On the contrary, being Jewish had helped expedite his release, even though he was not observant. According to Elnecavé, under Timerman’s direction La Opinión had employed a group of subversives, and he ended his article by asserting that Timerman had escaped precisely because he was Jewish. If his detention was an expression of antisemitism—which the editor insisted it was not—then his Judaism, ironically, secured his release. This editorial was reprinted on October 14 by the conservative, traditional daily La Prensa (which on the whole supported the military regime).38 On October 16, the Argentine ambassador in Washington distributed the article to every member of the U.S. Congress.39 Timerman’s deportation to Israel did not end the affair, which continued to be a bone of contention between Jerusalem and the military junta for years. For example, when Dov Schmorack presented his letters of accreditation as Israeli ambassador to Argentina on May 14, 1980, President Videla told him: We make every effort to let wounds heal. For example, we released a journalist in whose release your predecessor was also interested. He was arrested not as a journalist, nor as a Jew, but because of his links with
subversive elements that fostered terrorism. Now he’s orchestrating a campaign to defame Argentina around the world.
Nevertheless, claimed Schmorack, Videla’s criticism did not affect bilateral relations. As he told the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, [Videla] displayed his satisfaction over the rapprochement between the two countries and suggested that I look at what else could be done to continue developing the relations between the two countries and the armed forces of both. He was enthusiastic about my definition, that from Afghanistan to the Bahamas there is a single front . . . and he said that our two countries are in the same boat.40
Despite Argentina’s significant trade relations with the Soviet Union, Videla held anti-Soviet views in the spirit of the Cold War, and he saw Argentina and Israel as partners in the struggle against Bolshevism.41 The subject of Timerman also came up in a conversation between the new ambassador and the Argentine interior minister, General A lbano Eduardo Harguindeguy. In his report from Buenos Aires, Schmorack wrote: [Harguindeguy said:] [O]nce I requested that the prisoner Timerman be brought to my office. He sat where you are sitting now and I asked him why he lied to me [about his relations with David Graiver]. . . . Timerman admitted that he had lied. I said to him: We were friends and you lied to me, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Timerman is an arrogant person who will never be ashamed of himself. He’s going to make trouble for you all.
Schmorack added: By the way, you did well not to allow the main leaders of the Jewish community in Argentina to intervene on his behalf. The leaders are offended because Timerman is accusing them of behaving like the Judenrat, and the publication of the announcement in the Knesset [about the bestowal of an award on Timerman] seems to lend credence to an accusation of this kind, so they do not like it at all.42
To avoid any more embarrassing situations on the official level, in June 1980 the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its delegations in the Southern Cone not to distribute a certain Hebrew press summary translated into Spanish, because page 7 featured the news that Timerman had been awarded a prize in Israel for his struggle for freedom
[15] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[16] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
of the press in Argentina.43 About a year later, Harguindeguy’s successor in the interior ministry, General Horacio Tomás Liendo, would once again bring up the subject in his conversation with the Israeli diplomat, who informed his superiors: “A third of the meeting, which lasted an hour and a half, was devoted, at his initiative, to Timerman. I firmly rejected his efforts to involve me in any commitment to rein in Timerman or to exercise any influence on him.”44 In a memorandum prepared by the ministry in late August 1981, before the send-off for the Argentine ambassador who had served for nine years in Tel Aviv, the head of the Latin American division, Menachem Karmi, wrote: The ambassador complains of a conspiracy of silence on the part of the government of Israel. He claims to know of many people who are pained by the fact that Timerman takes the name of the Holocaust in vain by comparing Argentina today with Nazi Germany. The official spokes persons of the government of Israel also barely speak up when the U.S. mass media defame the Argentine government as though it were holding the Jews hostage and using them to force Israel to sell it arms.45
An “Ungrateful” Immigrant? Even during the time Timerman was imprisoned in Argentina, Israeli representatives were discouraging his relatives and friends from any public international campaign, on the grounds that it would compromise the chances for his release. Timerman’s son Héctor related that, when Timerman was transferred to house arrest, he was visited by Nirgad and Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer. Nirgad tried to convince him to sign a letter maintaining that he had been well treated and that he had no complaint against the government. “My father refused and, when Nirgad insisted, he told him that he would rather continue his imprisonment than sign. He remained a prisoner for another year.”46 When Consul Pinchas Avivi escorted Timerman to the plane on which he departed, he advised him not to denounce the military government. Nevertheless, as soon as the airplane landed for a stopover in Madrid, Timerman made statements to the local press. A few minutes earlier he had called his son and said to him, “The Israelis are crazy if they think I’m going to shut up.”47 Timerman was reunited with his family in Tel Aviv and agreed to publish a series of six articles in Ma‘ariv in which he would describe in detail his trial and the months of his captivity, with particulars on the
state of human rights in Argentina and an analysis of events in Latin America, especially in the countries of the Southern Cone, all of which were ruled by military regimes. Ma‘ariv even made arrangements with several major newspapers around the world for syndicated publication of the articles. However, in October 1979, before the first article appeared, Timerman was called to Jerusalem for an interview with Yosef Chechanover, director-general of the Foreign Ministry. At that meeting, Chechanover asked him not to publish the articles at the request of Argentines living in Israel whose children were desaparecidos and who worried that their children, as hostages of the military junta, would be endangered if Timerman went ahead with the project. He would also be endangering the lives of journalist Robert Cox, rabbis Marshall Meyer and Roberto Graetz, and his own brother, José.48 The day before, at a reception, Argentine ambassador Jorge Casal had told the editor of the Jerusalem Post that there was great concern about the dramatic consequences the planned publication could have for his country. Timerman, though not a fan of quiet diplomacy,49 decided not to publish the articles. He was enraged at having to give in to the blackmail of the rulers in Buenos Aires but feared for the lives of the young desaparecidos, as he would later explain.50 In the months since leaving Argentina, Timerman had been treated sympathetically by the Israeli press: “fighter for human rights” and “fervent Zionist” were the usual descriptions applied to the former editor of La Opinión. But his presence made the local government establishment increasingly uncomfortable. The relations between Israel and Argentina were closer than ever,51 and the journalist was casting a shadow that could become threatening. On May 25, 1980, Timerman was to receive the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the president of the World Association of Newspapers. The ceremony was slated to take place in the Knesset, in the presence of government representatives, and would even include a short speech by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. At the last moment, however, pressure by the government (which feared reprisals by the Argentine junta) forced the Knesset speaker’s office to move the celebration to a hall at the Hebrew University, where the highest-ranking dignitary present was the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek.52 Meanwhile, Yitzhak Shamir, recently appointed minister of foreign affairs, attended a reception held by the Argentine embassy to celebrate its national holiday. The Hebrew press published unofficial leaks from the Foreign Ministry indicating that the pressure to cancel the Timerman ceremony came from parents of desaparecidos, who feared for the lives of their loved ones.53 This was one more a ttempt
[17] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[18] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
by Israeli diplomacy to justify the absence of public criticism of Argentine human-rights violations. Timerman spent more than a year in his new home in Ramat Aviv writing his book Preso sin nombre, celda sin número. It had appeared a few months earlier in English as Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. The book’s debut in May 1981 provided an opportunity to revive the controversy over the author and relations between Israel and Argentina. The headline of an item published by the Ha-’arets correspondent in New York was indicative: “Owing to the debate unleashed by journalist Timerman’s book, sources in Washington claim Israel is caving in to Argentina’s threats to hurt the Jews if Israel does not supply it with arms.”54 The Hebrew press was part of that debate. In a feature in Ma‘ariv’s weekend supplement, Gabriel Strassman wondered, after a long interview with Timerman, about something that had not been addressed even in Prisoner without a Name: If everything is so bad, why does it seem to be so good? Why did a delegation of Jewish athletes from Argentina march in the recently inaugurated Maccabi Games, waving their blue and white flag? And why did the half-million Jews in Argentina not just pack their things and leave that Nazi country? He concluded by asserting, “It seems to me that to this question, too, Timerman has no answer.”55 Strassman’s words reflected a standard Zionist stance, which negated the legitimacy of the Jewish Diaspora and failed to understand why all the Jews in the world did not leave their homes and move to Israel. Timerman’s book, published and distributed in English by a large and prestigious American publishing house, Knopf, was published in Hebrew by a small press, Domino, a few months after the original. Ma‘ariv was originally going to publish it, but withdrew for reasons that were not made clear. Although the debate over the book was reflected in the Hebrew press, the publication of the Hebrew version did not have much impact, and some considered this evidence of a conspiracy of silence. “The book came out last April in the United States and aroused heated public debate. It was published about two months ago here, too, in Hebrew translation, and up to now hardly a peep has been heard about it. It is a short book, only 160 pages total; scandalous and shocking,” wrote Amos Elon in Ha-’arets.56 In a long feature entitled “Who’s Afraid of Timerman?” Elon asked a few more trenchant questions: Why did Ma‘ariv go back on its plan to publish Timerman’s book? What happened? Because the editors think “it’s not interesting” and “it won’t
sell,” “it’s not marketable,” as Shmuel Shnitzer, Ma‘ariv’s editor, says? Or, perhaps because one of the main shareholders of Ma‘ariv has close business ties with Argentina, as Timerman supposes? We will never know the truth for certain, but we know that Timerman put many people in a bind in this country and at Ma‘ariv by criticizing the Begin government’s internal and external policy. The dignitaries and public figures who welcomed him at the airport have distanced themselves from him. We can guess why.57
In this vein, Yoav Karni had written several months earlier: A transparent attempt is being made to deflect the discussion of Timerman’s book to an irrelevant sphere by talking about the author’s personality instead of reviewing the content of what he writes. On July 17 of this year I interviewed Jacobo Timerman for a variety show on Kol Israel. This was the first time, in the course of the latest tempest, that an Israeli communication medium gave Timerman a concrete opportunity to say something. 58
However, the most significant sign of the reversal in local press attitudes toward Timerman came with the publication of his second book, which was about Israel’s first war in Lebanon. The journalist finished writing it in his Tel Aviv apartment in August 1982, at the height of the Israeli invasion.59 He did not mince words in his strong criticism of the Israeli action: For the first time, Israel had attacked a neighboring country without being attacked; for the first time it had mounted a screen of provocation to justify a war. For the first time Israel brought destruction to entire cities: Tyre, Sidon, Damur, Beirut. For the first time military spokesmen had lied. For the first time the Israeli press joined them in their successful mission of lying to the public. For the first time officers and men did not know the objectives or the goals of the campaign. For the first time the actual damage inflicted on the invaded country was hidden along with the number of deaths. For the first time reservists on leave from the front demonstrated on the streets of Jerusalem because they consider themselves betrayed.60
After the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps just outside Beirut, he added an epilogue containing serious accusations against the Israel Defense Forces and the government’s foreign policy. Although in Israel protests against the war were beginning to escalate, especially after the Sabra and Shatila murders, Timerman’s book met with a cool reception and even open hostility. He was among the first to raise his voice against this war and used harsh words to criticize the Israeli leadership. For many Israelis who justified the war, it was
[19] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[20] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
hard to digest such criticism from someone who was generally regarded as a Jewish fighter for human rights. Yehuda Ben Meir, deputy foreign minister at the time, declared in an interview in the United States with the highly rated CBS television program 60 Minutes: “We got him out of Argentina. Now he attacks and denigrates Israel. Any rational person can understand that his book is a collection of calumnies and lies arising from his own self-hatred.”61 In response to the attacks against him—for example, the accusation that he had been in London during the war, as though that were relevant—Timerman granted a long interview to the weekly Ha-‘olam ha-zeh: During the war I was here. At this table. Yoel Marcus, of Ha-’arets, says that I was in London, that I was not in Israel for the war. It’s been almost a year since I was in London. I began writing in June and finished in August. And afterward I wrote an epilogue about Sabra and Shatila.62
He then added: “Yoel Marcus is angry about things I said in the book; he did not even read it. He says that most of the population in Israel is very happy about what happened in Sabra and Shatila. And I say that too!”63 The references to Marcus were in response to an article by the veteran reporter that appeared in Ha-’arets in late 1982 and that began trenchantly: If I feel repelled by people like Mr. Jacob Timerman, it is because his behavior and his statements automatically make me a fan of Menachem Begin. . . . After having settled his serious scores with Argentina, he found his new purpose in the war against the tyrannical regime in Israel. He has turned into a Latin-Polish, pocket-size edition of Bruno Kreisky.64
Timerman spared no one in talking about the Israeli leaders who conducted the war on Lebanese territory in the summer of 1982; he wrote of Prime Minister Begin that he was “a terrorist, and a disgrace to his people”; he described the then-minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, as the man who wanted to turn Israel into “the Prussia of the Middle East.”65 It should be noted that Timerman’s oldest son, Daniel, who was a kibbutz member and a reserve soldier, was sentenced to repeated terms in military prison for refusing, as a conscientious objector, to serve in Lebanon. Jacobo went to visit him for the first time in October 1982, at Military Prison No. 6, near the city of Atlit, but he could not overcome his physical aversion when he tried to enter the prison.
He told his companions that he could not put himself behind bars again. After this attempt, until Daniel completed his sentence, his mother Risha went alone to visit him twice a week. Journalist Amos Elon described the Israeli period of Timerman’s life thus: After his expulsion from Argentina in 1979, he settled in Israel. A veteran Zionist, he could have put down roots very comfortably in New York, but he preferred a modest apartment in Ramat Aviv. Israel was largely a disappointment to him, especially in the days of the war in Lebanon. The Israelis were not well disposed to his criticism of that war, even when others were harsher still. Is it possible that his status as a new immigrant had something to do with it, perhaps unconsciously? . . . It is a fact that Yitzhak Shamir, as prime minister, described Timerman to a surprised American interviewer as “an ungrateful man.” Timerman was an unexpected deviation from the usual image of “prisoners of Zion,” and not in a good way. In Israel he was vilified and socially isolated; an anonymous taxi driver once spit in his face. In his words, in Israel he felt “like a Jew in the Diaspora” and not, as he had hoped upon arrival, “like a Jew coming home.”66
Israeli Citizen Timerman Returns to Argentina On January 7, 1984, a month after Ricardo Raúl Alfonsín assumed the presidency in Argentina, Timerman landed at the Ezeiza International Airport with his wife, Risha. Upon his arrival he was forced to give an impromptu press conference, at which he was asked, among other things, whether he had decided to leave Israel. In responding, Timerman was evasive and avoided making blunt remarks. He was clearly unprepared for the series of questions fired at him and would have preferred to avoid the local press until he had readjusted to his new situation, only then sharing his thoughts and plans. Three years later, in Buenos Aires, he described the experience of returning to Argentina, as reported by Elon: Timerman told me about the difficulties he had in putting down roots again in Argentina. He feels a need to participate in the struggle for democracy, and he was a witness in the trial of the generals and in the pretrial hearings of several of the officers who tortured him. He is a fervent supporter of President Alfonsín, and following his return he received damages for [the loss of] his daily, La Opinión, which the generals confiscated and then neglected to the point of letting it expire. But Timerman has not yet found his place in Argentina, and in our chat he
[21] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[22] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
wondered if he ever would. “My connection with this country was damaged,” he said. “I am not managing to rehabilitate my personality here. They tell me that repression will not return. Intellectually, that is probably right. Emotionally, I am not at all certain. I can’t stay here more than a few months. Every so often I have to leave, get out, breathe.” Many people recognize Timerman on the street, approach him, and cordially shake his hand. Others do not feel comfortable in his company. He is a controversial man. In less than 10 years Timerman challenged five established orthodoxies: the Argentine left and the right (he called them both fascists); the official Jewish community (he accused its leaders of having cooperated with the generals); the neoconservatives in the United States; and the nationalists in Israel. When James Nielson, editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, was asked why Timerman still makes people uncomfortable, he answered, “Being Jewish doesn’t help . . . he will always feel injured. He is the eternal outsider, someone who [just] pretends to belong everywhere he goes.”67
In an interview granted a short time previously to Ha-’arets, Timerman had explained: I returned [to Argentina] to demand my birthright and to judge my torturers. I testified and insisted that the government return my newspaper to me. Since it no longer exists, they gave me damages. I did not ask for my Argentine citizenship back because I am Israeli and I will remain so forever. What can you do? Although the Israelis do not love me, I love them.68
When the interviewer reminded him that he had left the country in anger, he answered: An immense anger against Shamir, Sharon, Raful [General Rafael Eitan]; not against Israel. It is true that people were not nice to me, but there is a difference between being subject to hysteria and national neurosis, and dragging a people into a war that is not vital. I have no negative feelings toward the people of Israel.69
Timerman would never return to Israel. After obtaining substantial material compensation from the Argentine government for the confiscation of La Opinión, he tried unsuccessfully to return to the world of journalism. But he had lost his “magic touch.” He kept trying nevertheless, authoring several books that enjoyed only limited success, and died at home in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Buenos Aires on November 11, 1999. He was 76. Many newspapers in the West published obituaries the following day. The New York Times, for example, said that Timerman had spent his whole life defending democratic in-
stitutions and human rights. El País in Madrid and the Parisian Le Monde both marked the journalist’s passing with warm tributes. The Israeli dailies, in contrast, provided only terse reports of his death. His funeral, in a private cemetery in Buenos Aires, was an intimate gathering of 30 people, most of them relatives and friends. Many of those present were surprised by the small scale of the procession that accompanied the final journey of the man who had been one of the most important Argentine journalists of the twentieth century.70 Conclusion Bilateral relations with Argentina always held pride of place in Israel’s ties with Latin America, partly because of Argentina’s large, vital Jewish community and the successful integration into Israeli society of tens of thousands of immigrants from that country.71 Nevertheless, historiography on the triangular relationship between the two countries and the local Jewish community is limited. The difficulty of locating relevant archival documentation is an obstacle for researchers interested in uncovering the diverse facets of this complex relationship from the independence of the Jewish state in 1948 up to the present day. This difficulty is even greater when it comes to documenting the so-called “Process of National Reorganization,” beginning in the mid-1970s. These ties have not been researched in any systematic, orderly fashion, among other reasons because at least part of the relevant diplomatic material has not yet been declassified in its entirety, especially documentation on exports of war matériel. Despite this, various aspects of relations in those black years have attracted the attention of a few historians, as witnessed by the research on the departure for Israel by several hundred Jews who feared their lives were in danger from the military regime.72 In this article, we have sought to examine various aspects of a central event that affected the relations between the two countries and that can illuminate how Israeli policy toward the Argentine military dictatorship was formed. We have explored the degree to which human rights and/or concern for the interests of the local Jews, both individually and as a community, set the standard for the decision makers and determined the steps taken to free the Jewish-Argentine journalist who had enjoyed such close and longstanding ties with Israeli institutions and the embassy in Buenos Aires. We have revealed considerable tensions within official Israeli attitudes and actions regarding Timerman. These had to do, on the one hand, with the realpolitik of the
[23] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[24] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
diplomatic service, the national security apparatus, and the military industry, and, on the other, with the desire to help Argentine Jews in general and Timerman in particular as they ran afoul of an antisemitic military regime bent on exterminating or extirpating “deviant” ideologies from the Argentine body politic. In Israel, the enthusiasm with which the most famous political prisoner in Argentina was initially received following his release soon vanished. When Timerman refused to be pigeonholed as the Diaspora Jew who finds redemption in the national Jewish home, many withdrew their support for him. It is also true that he was ahead of many in his criticisms of the invasion of Lebanon, at a time when such criticisms triggered contempt and hostility—all the more so when they were being made by a recent arrival whose life had been saved in part because of the intervention of the Israeli government. The alienation of the establishment and the Israeli press from Timerman also reflected their continued failure to understand how Zionist identity is perceived by many Jews in the Diaspora, including in Argentina. Many Zionists there consider themselves first and foremost Argentines, and their Jewish and Zionist identities do not depend on a willingness to leave the country where they live to immigrate to Israel, nor on giving priority to their commitments to the State of Israel or Zionism. Yet they do not renounce the various components of their strong ethnic identity as Argentine Jews, either.73 Their self-perception continues to run into mistrust and lack of empathy. In Timerman’s case, it even caused the two countries that were the pillars of his identity, Argentina and Israel, to forsake him. No wonder that he once characterized himself as an “exile of the world.” 74
Notes The authors are grateful to the Sourasky Chair of Iberian and Latin American Studies and the S. Daniel Abraham Center of International and Regional Studies, both at Tel Aviv University, for their support of this research, as well as to the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University in Atlanta, where we were able to finish our work. An earlier version of this article was published in Hebrew under the title “Mi-gibor yehudi le-‘okher Yisra’el: Parashat Timerman, ha-mimsad ha-yisra’eli veha-‘ittonut ha-ivrit,” Israel 15 (2009): 167–91. Copies of the documents quoted in this article were given to us by a veteran Israeli diplomat. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from foreign-language sources are ours.
1 On the so-called Process of National Reorganization, see, e.g., Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina (Westport, Conn., 2002); Donald C. Hodges, Argentina’s “Dirty War”: An Intellectual Biography (Austin, Tex., 1991); and Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, Colo., 1993). On the development of the Doctrine of National Security, see Samuel Amaral, “Guerra Revolucionaria: De Argelia a la Argentina, 1957–1962,” Investigaciones y Ensayos 48 (1998): 173–95. 2 Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (New York, 1981). The Spanish version, Preso sin nombre, celda sin número, was published in 1982. A Hebrew version, ’Asir le-lo’ shem, ta’ le-lo’ mispar, came out in 1981. 3 In this respect, see Gabriel (Gabby) Sheffer and Hadas Roth-Toledano, Mi manhig? ‘Al yachasei Yisra’el veha-tefutsah ha-yehudit (Tel Aviv, 2006). On the specific case of the largest Latin American community, see Raanan Rein, Argentina, Israel and the Jews, trans. Martha Grenzeback (Bethesda, Md., 2003), and Raanan Rein, “Israel and Argentine Jews: Complementary or Conflicting Interests?,” in Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorni, and Yaacov Ro’i (Boston, 2003), 306–34. 4 For a critical view of the position that Israeli authorities took on Jewish detainees, see Marcel Zohar, Shelach ’et ‘ami la-Aza’zel: Begidah be-khachol lavan (Tel Aviv, 1990). His criticisms were echoed in Nurit Keidar’s documentary film, Asesino (Israel, 2002). Similar views were expressed by Itzhak Pundak, who between 1977 and 1979 was director of the Jewish Agency in Buenos Aires (personal interview, Tel Aviv, Nov. 26, 2003). For a justification of the actions of the Israeli diplomatic establishment, see Joel Barromi, “Ha-’im hufkeru Yehudei Argentinah?,” Gesher 133 (Summer 1996): 53–71, and Efraim Zadoff, “Mechuyyavutah shel Yisra’el kelappei Yehudei ha-tefutsot be-‘ittot mashber: Ha-mikreh shel Argentinah, 1976–1983,” Bitachon Leumi 2–3 (2003): 45–59. 5 The commission’s conclusions were published later in CONADEP, Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires, 1993). 6 For Timerman’s full testimony, see http://www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/testimon/timerman.htm. Regarding the places mentioned in his account: Campo de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, is Argentina’s largest military base and the headquarters of the First Army Corps; Magdalena is a city some 93 miles from Buenos Aires and is the site of several military installations; Puesto Vasco and COT-I Martínez are detention and torture camps that were illegally operated by the security forces and where many of the prisoners were murdered. At the 2007 trial in La Plata of the priest Christian Von Wernich for crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship, several witnesses testified about the torture to which Timerman had been subjected and the clearly antisemitic character of the interrogations he underwent. See “Timerman acusó al
[25] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[26] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
sacerdote Von Wenrich,” La Nación, July 17, 2007, and “Timerman y Perrota en el juicio de Von Wenrich,” Página12, July 16, 2007. 7 Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, 130. 8 The Andinia Plan was first featured in an antisemitic campaign that began in 1971–72 when Walter Beveraggi Allende, an economics professor at the University of Buenos Aires with connections to the military, published an “exposé” detailing the alleged secret plan. For the Jewish community’s reaction, see Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas de Argentina, Versión argentina de la mayor superchería del siglo: Radiografía del “Plan Andinia” y otros infundios (Buenos Aires, 1972). Despite the antisemitic character and general improbability of the Andinia Plan, every so often rumors of its existence resurface in different institutions in Argentina. For example, the chief of general staff, Lieutenant General Roberto Bendini, mentioned it as one of the army’s working hypotheses during a conference for the upper ranks of the army’s School of National Defense. When he was quoted by the press, he claimed his remarks had been taken out of context. See http://www .lanacion.com.ar/Archivo/nota.asp?nota_id=529017. Two years later, the Organización Islámica Argentina, headquartered in the great mosque of Buenos Aires, mentioned on its Internet site that Israel planned to set up another Jewish state in southern Argentina. See http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-54283-2005-07-28.html. 9 See http://www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/testimon/timerman .htm. 10 Telegram entitled “Antishemiyyut,” Ram Nirgad to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, May 19, 1978, in authors’ archive. 11 Ramón J. A. Camps, Caso Timerman, punto final (Buenos Aires, 1982), 17–21. 12 Juan Gasparini, David Graiver: El banquero de los Montoneros (Buenos Aires, 2007). 13 Jorge Saborido, “El antisemitismo en la historia argentina reciente: La revista Cabildo y la conspiración judía,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 30 (2004): 209–23. 14 This was a common attitude among Jewish community leaders, who were worried about the growing political violence and instability under the Peronist regime, then under the leadership of Perón’s third wife. Statistics published by the Buenos Aires Herald indicate a total of 1,100 dead by political violence during 1975. There was also concern about growing antisemitism, in part encouraged by José López Rega, who since May 1973 had held the social welfare portfolio. See Leonardo Senkman, “Judíos argentinos en riesgo y esfera pública internacional: Intercesiones por el antisemitismo populista (1974–75) y los reclamos al neopopulismo (1989–1999),” Judaica Latinoamericana 6 (2009): 269–304. 15 On bilateral relations between the United States and Argentina during the military dictatorship, see David M. K. Sheinin, Argentina and the
United States: An Alliance Contained (Athens, Ga., 2006), chap. 6; Ariel C. Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984 (Athens, Ga., 1997); and Joseph S. Tulchin, Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship (Boston, 1990), chap. 8. 16 No thorough research has yet been published on the relations between Israel and Argentina during this period. See Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, “From Argentina to Israel: Escape, Evacuation and Exile,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (2005): 351–77; Zadoff, “Mechuyyavutah shel Yisra’el kelappei Yehudei ha-tefutsot”; Barromi, “Ha-’im hufkeru Yehudei Argentinah?”; Zohar, Shelach ’et ‘aami la‘Aza’zel; Leonardo Senkman, “Millut Yehudim be-Argentinah be-‘et ha-mishtar ha-tseva’i, 1976–1983,” in ’Or la-goyim? Mediniyyut ha-chuts shel Yisra’el u-zechuyyot ha-’adam, ed. Dafna Sharfman (Tel Aviv, 1999), 91–118; and Yitzhak Mualem, “Between a Jewish and an Israeli Foreign Policy: Israel–Argentina Relations and the Issue of Jewish Disappeared Persons and Detainees under the Military Junta, 1976–1983,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16, nos. 1–2 (2004), http://www.jcpa.org/jpsr/ jpsr-mualem-s04.htm. 17 Dov Schmorack to Foreign Ministry, telegram, Sept. 5, 1976, authors’ archive. From 1977 to 1981, Israel supplied 14 percent of all armaments purchased by Argentina. Argentina’s primary supplier was the Federal Republic of Germany (33 percent), followed by the United States (17 percent), France (14 percent), Israel, and other countries. Israel’s volume of sales rose following 1982, when the Western boycott of arms sales to Argentina intensified as a result of alliances between the other suppliers and the United Kingdom. See Bishara Bahbah, “Israel’s Military Relationships with Ecuador and Argentina,” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 2 (1986): 76–101, and Hernán Dobry, Operación Israel: La dictadura argentina y la compra de armas (unpublished manuscript, Buenos Aires, 2009). 18 Shulamit Aloni, “Akhen, musar be-bitachon,” Ha-’arets, May 26, 2006. On Speaker of the Knesset Menachem Savidor’s rejection of Aloni’s motion to add to the agenda an urgent debate on the disappearance of thousands of Argentine citizens, including many Jews, see Shlomo Ginossar, “Argentinah, Argentinah,” Davar, May 16, 1983. 19 DAIA, Informe sobre la situación de los detenidos-desaparecidos judíos durante el genocidio perpetrado en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1999); Edy Kaufman, “Jewish Victims of Repression in Argentina under Military Rule (1976– 1983),” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 4 (1989): 479–99. 20 Comisión Israelí por los desaparecidos judíos en la Argentina, Informe, http://www.mfa.gov.il/desaparecidos/dincomitispen.html. The Knesset members who expressed a willingness to collaborate included Geula Cohen and Dror Zeigerman from the Likud Party and Menachem Hacohen from the Labour Party; see their accounts at Institute of Contemporary Judaism, Oral History Department, Hebrew Univer-
[27] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[28] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
sity of Jerusalem, file numbers 216/23, 216/40, and 216/42. The parliamentary commission, which consisted of Cohen, Zeigerman, Hacohen, and Yair Tzaban, arrived in Buenos Aires early in 1984, after Raúl Alfonsín had already assumed the presidency of the republic. 21 Ibid. 22 Authors’ archive. In June 1981, no fewer than 118 Argentine officers were visiting in Israel. A letter from the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires on June 2, 1981, after a meeting between the ambassador and the heads of the Argentine Foreign Ministry, said: “There is no other country in the world where so many Argentine officers are found at the same time performing tasks of acquisition, training, etc.” (authors’ archive). 23 On Israeli policy toward leftist militant Jews in Argentina, see Senkman, “Millut Yehudim be-Argentinah be-‘et ha-mishtar ha-tseva’i, 1976–1983”; Sznajder and Roniger, “From Argentina to Israel”; and idem, “De Argentina a Israel: Escape y exilio,” in Represión y destierro: Itinerarios del exilio argentino, ed. Pablo Yankelevich (La Plata, 2005), 157–85. 24 Raanan Rein and Efraim Davidi, “Sports, Politics, and Exile: Protests in Israel during the World Cup (Argentina, 1978),” International Journal of the History of Sport 26, no. 5 (Apr. 2009): 673–92. 25 This was stated by the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, in a letter sent to the State Department. See Graciela Mochkofsky, Timerman, el periodista que quiso ser parte del poder (1923–1999) (Buenos Aires, 2003), 253. In December 1977, Amnesty International declared Timerman a “prisoner of conscience” and mobilized its sections all over the world in a campaign to liberate him. See Amnesty International, Background to the Case of Jacobo Timerman (London, 1977). 26 David Cox, Dirty Secrets, Dirty War: The Exile of Robert J. Cox (Buenos Aires, Argentina: 1976–1983) (Charleston, S.C., 2008). See also Andrew Graham-Yooll, Committed Observer: Memoirs of a Journalist (London, 1995). 27 Abrasha Rotenberg, Historia confidencial: La Opinión y otros olvidos (Buenos Aires, 1999). 28 Joel Barromi, “Israel frente a la dictadura militar argentina: El episodio de Córdoba y el caso Timerman,” in El legado del autoritarismo: Derechos humanos y antisemitismo en la Argentina contemporánea, ed. Leonardo Senkman and Mario Sznajder (Buenos Aires, 1995), 331. 29 Nirgad to Foreign Ministry, Apr. 5, 1976, authors’ archive. A month later, General Roberto Viola (later chief of staff and president of Argentina) visited Nirgad in his home, and, in a secret telegram sent on May 11, 1976, the latter informed the Israeli Foreign Ministry that “his [Viola’s] attitude toward Israel is favorable, he considers us an important pillar in the war against the spread of communism, the Middle East being an important focus of that war. . . . To him, any movement that is not rightwing is leftwing; the center does not exist, and the entire left is suspect” (authors’ archive). On July 3, 1976, Defense Minister José María Klix was at Nirgad’s residence. The ambassador’s report
stated that “his [Klix’s] ideas put us strongly in mind of the style we remembered from the 1930s in Europe. The war against communism opens the door to forces of the extreme right. The minister’s words made this very clear. Our worry is that within the right wing there is a great concentration of antisemitic forces” (authors’ archive). 30 On the community establishment’s attitudes toward the suppression of human rights under the dictatorship, see Ignacio Klich, “Políticas comunitarias durante las Juntas Militares argentinas: La DAIA durante el Proceso de Reorganización Nacional,” in El antisemitismo en la Argentina, ed. Leonardo Senkman (Buenos Aires, 1989), 274–309. 31 Gabriela Lotersztain, Los judíos bajo el terror: Argentina 1976–1983 (Buenos Aires, 2008), 264. 32 Mochkofsky, Timerman. 33 Yishayahu Anug, interview by authors, Jerusalem, Jan. 20, 2003. 34 Anug to Nirgad, Mar. 26, 1978, authors’ archive. Mordechai (“Mota”) Gur had recently retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant-general, after having been the tenth chief of general staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 1974 to 1978, the same period when the armed forces of the two countries were developing stronger ties. In 1981 he was elected to the Knesset as a Labour Party representative, and he was deputy minister of defense from 1992 until his death in 1995. Having returned to life as a civilian in 1978, he had promoted Israeli military industry exports all over the world, including Latin America. When he visited Argentina in 1978, he was received by General Viola, one of the strongmen of the regime, who would succeed Videla first as commander in chief and sub sequently as president. Gur gave a few lectures at the Academia de Seguridad Nacional. Six months later, Deputy Minister of Defense Brigadier-General (res.) Mordechai Tzipori arrived. The eighth chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, also gave a series of lectures at the Academia, in Aug. 1980, and was received warmly by the military leadership. So many Israeli leaders visited Argentina that, in Feb. 1979, Nirgad sent the Israeli Foreign Ministry a “secret and urgent” message saying that “it is usual to consult with the ambassador before making decisions or [arranging] visits of VIPs. Aren’t you a follower of this practice? Since Israel’s independence day [May 1978] we have had visits from Mordechai Gur, Haim Laskov [lieutenant general in the reserves, and fifth chief of staff of the IDF between 1958 and 1961], Mordechai Hod [general in the reserves, and commander of the Israeli Air Force between 1966 and 1973; at the time of his visit he was general manager of El Al, the Israeli national airline], Deputy Minister Tzipori, and the most exalted members of the military hierarchy, as well as ministers and deputy ministers” (authors’ archive). 35 Inbar to Israeli Foreign Ministry, Nov. 24, 1978 (authors’ archive). Because of Nirgad’s poor health, Inbar remained in charge of the embassy for a long time and took care of the practical measures and final arrangements for Timerman’s release. This is how Inbar himself defined his diplomatic position in a letter sent to Knesset member Dror
[29] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
[30] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Zeigerman on Mar. 29, 1984, from New York, where Inbar was then consul-general of Israel (authors’ archive). On Massera’s influence on the newspaper Convicción, see Marcelo Borrelli, El diario de Massera: Historia y política editorial de Convicción (Buenos Aires, 2008). 36 Joel Barromi, interview by authors, Jerusalem, Dec. 12, 2003. The attempt to pressure the Argentine regime through the mass media was nothing new. In Nirgad to Foreign Ministry, June 15, 1976, before Argentine finance minister Martínez de Hoz’s visit to the United States, the ambassador wrote: “We suggest that, whenever he [de Hoz] holds press conferences in Washington D.C. and in Ottawa, our representatives should ‘plant’ the following question about the situation in Argentina: ‘A law was enacted prohibiting partisan activities, and 48 party organizations, the vast majority of them linked to the extreme left, have been dissolved. There is the impression that organizations of the extreme right, including some recognized as Nazi and antisemitic organizations that have committed acts of incitement and have published material of that sort, continue to operate and the law is not enforced against them.’ The goal is that the minister will tell his government that public opinion in the capital cities is concerned—although, at this stage, without arousing any suspicion that they are being accused and that they are suspected of being antisemites” (authors’ archive). 37 Ana Baron, “Caso Timerman: El día en que Videla amagó con renunciar,” Clarín, Dec. 4, 2009. 38 Nissim Elnecavé, “Timerman: El abuso del argumento del antisemitismo,” La Prensa, Oct. 14, 1979, p. 10. 39 Lotersztain, Los judíos bajo el terror, 283. 40 Dov Schmorack to Foreign Ministry, May 14, 1980, authors’ archive. 41 Isidoro Gilbert, El oro de Moscú: Historia secreta de la diplomacia, el comercio y la inteligencia soviética en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2007). 42 Schmorack to Foreign Ministry, June 2, 1980, authors’ archive. 43 Mario Sagui, Division of Latin America 2, to Shmuel Hadas, director of Public Relations in the Foreign Ministry, June 9, 1980, authors’ archive. 44 Schmorack to Foreign Ministry, June 24, 1981, authors’ archive. 45 Menachem Karmi, director of Division of Latin America 2, to the foreign minister’s chief of staff, “Likra’t pegishat sar ha-chuts ‘im shagrir Argentinah,” Aug. 23, 1981, authors’ archive. 46 Héctor Timerman, “Israel, la dictadura y los consejos de Avivi,” Página12, July 30, 2001. 47 Ibid. 48 Jacobo Timerman, “The Silence of the Jews,” Harper’s Magazine (Nov. 1981): 20–23. 49 During a visit to the United States, Timerman declared that “a silent diplomacy is silence; a quiet diplomacy is surrender.” See John M. Goshko, “Argentinian Visits Lefever Hearing, Criticizes ‘Quiet Diplomacy’ Policy,” Washington Post, May 20, 1981, p. A3. 50 Mochkofsky, Timerman, 394.
51 This was declared by Nirgad at the end of 1977. See Marcel Zohar, “Me-’az she-‘altah ha-kat ha-tseva’it la-shilton chal shippur be-yachasei Yisra’elArgentinah,” Yedi‘ot acharonot, Nov. 16, 1977. See also “Shagrir Yisra’el: Argentinah u-memshaltah ’einan ’antishemiyyot,” Ma‘ariv, May 24, 1978. 52 Authors’ email correspondence with Timerman’s son Javier, Jan. 2010. 53 Tova Tzimuki, “Be-lachats Argentinah butlah ha-’anakat pras ha‘ittonut ha-chofshit le-Ya‘acov Timerman be-mishkan ha-knesset,” Davar, May 26, 1980. 54 “Be-‘ikvot ha-pulmos seviv sifro shel ha-‘ittona’y Timerman, to‘anim mekorot be-Vashington: Yisra’el nikhnea‘ le-iyyumei Argentinah lifgoa’ bi-yehudim ’im lo’ tesappek la-neshek,” Ha-’arets, June 5, 1981. 55 Gabriel Strassman, “Zehu ha-shalav ha-ri’shon shel ha-innuyim,” Ma‘ariv, July 17, 1981. 56 Amos Elon, “Mi mefached mi-Timerman?” Ha-’arets, Jan. 15, 1982. 57 Ibid. 58 Yoav Karni, “Parashat Timerman: Kesher ha-shetikah,” Basha‘ar 3, no. 155 (Sept. 1981): 7. 59 Jacobo Timerman, The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon, trans. Miguel Acoca (New York, 1982). Curiously enough, according to Timerman’s close associate Abrasha Rotemberg, earlier that year Timerman had been considering writing a book entitled “Why I Love Israel” (interview by authors, Buenos Aires, Nov. 27, 2009). 60 Timerman, The Longest War, 21. 61 Mochkofsky, Timerman, 424. 62 Marcel Zohar, “Lechitsat yad le-rotschei yehudim,” Ha-‘olam ha-zeh, Dec. 22, 1982. 63 Ibid. 64 “Fear Not, My Servant Jacobo,” Ha-’arets, Dec. 1, 1982. 65 Angus Deming, “Timerman’s Angry Dissent,” Newsweek, Dec. 20, 1982, p. 14. 66 Amos Elon, “Argentinah,” Koteret ra’shit, Oct. 8, 1986, p. 29. 67 Ibid., 29, 31. 68 Lili Galili, “Ani ha-matspun shel ha-medinot,” Ha-’arets, Feb. 15, 1984. 69 Ibid. 70 Mochkofsky, Timerman, 472. 71 Luis Roniger and Deby Babis, “Latin American Israelis: The Collective Identity of an Invisible Community,” in Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism: Latin America in the Jewish World, ed. Judit Bokser Liwerant et al. (Boston, 2008), 297–320. 72 See, e.g., Sznajder and Roniger, “From Argentina to Israel,” and Rein and Davidi, “Sports, Politics, and Exile.” 73 Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora (Boston, 2010). 74 Shirley Christian, “Timerman, Stranger in Two More Strange Lands,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1987.
[31] Israeli Perceptions of Timerman
•
Raanan Rein & Efraim Davidi
Jews and the Racial State: Legacies of the Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa, 1945–60 Shirli Gilbert A bstr act This article is part of a larger study exploring how the Holocaust shaped responses to apartheid in South Africa, a weighty question given that country’s identity as the quintessential racial state after 1945. During the apartheid years (1948–94), memory of the Holocaust was regularly invoked by South Africans of diverse backgrounds and political motivations. Where some saw obvious parallels, however, others drew starkly different conclusions. The article focuses on the period from the war years until 1960, a formative phase during which South Africans adapted to the new regime and memory narratives began to be fashioned. Shifting patterns of discourse reveal, on one end of the spectrum, a gradual rapprochement between Afrikaners and Jews based in part on a willful amnesia about the Nazi period, and, on the other end, an anti-racist movement beginning to identify itself as “the most important moral battle in the world since the defeat of Nazism.” Key words: South Africa, apartheid, memory, Holocaust
A
s South Africa negotiated its transition to democracy in the early 1990s, one of the historical analogies most frequently invoked was between the “twin atrocities” of apartheid and the Holocaust. The genocide of European Jewry, and particularly the Nazi regime that perpetrated it, were perceived as obvious and potent historical benchmarks for understanding what had happened in South Africa, for envisioning justice and reconciliation, and for thinking about how apartheid might be historicized and commemorated.1
Shirli Gilbert, “Jews and the Racial State: Legacies of the Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa, 1945–60,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 16, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2010): 32–64
This was neither a new nor an unanticipated connection. As early as 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany, relationships were emerging between Nazism, Afrikaner nationalism, and South Africa’s numerous local racisms, including growing political antisemitism. During the apartheid years (1948–94), memories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were regularly invoked by Jews and non-Jews across the national spectrum. Where some saw obvious parallels, however, others drew starkly different conclusions about the implications of Nazism under apartheid. Some sought to downplay the connections, though for disparate reasons; others overstated them, challenging the apartheid state with the most morally potent language they could muster. Both mainstream and leftist Jewish responses were nourished by Holocaust memory, but in each case that memory had widely divergent implications and forms. Despite the pervasiveness of Nazism in South African public discourse, there has been little scholarly discussion of Holocaust memory as it has developed there over the course of more than five decades. Some scholars have pointed to the political uses and appropriations of the Holocaust, most extensively with reference to South African Jewish writing.2 In the context of a growing literature on Holocaust memory in Israel, the United States, Germany, and further afield, the absence of South Africa is conspicuous. In beginning to document the ways in which the Nazi past has been invoked in South Africa, this article thus works toward addressing a major lacuna in scholarship. The subject also has far-reaching implications for Jewish historiography and for our understanding of the Holocaust’s impact on the postwar world. Its importance stems from the interface of two factors in particular: the centrality of the Holocaust to South African Jewish identity, and South Africa’s status as the quintessential racial state after World War II. I focus here on the period from the war years until roughly 1960. My motivation for this periodization is based on worldwide patterns in Holocaust memorialization as well as developments in the South African context during that time. Regarding the former, the historiographic consensus until fairly recently has been that public discourse in the immediate postwar period, particularly in Israel and the United States, was characterized by a relative silence about the Holocaust that was dramatically broken by the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann (1960–62) and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.3 A number of important studies have challenged these claims, revealing that the Holocaust (though not yet described as such) featured prominently on the public agenda long before the 1960s, a trend that this study reinforces.4 In the South African context, this was a formative phase during
[33] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[34] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
which diverse sectors of society adapted to the new apartheid regime and memory narratives began to be fashioned and crystallized. Whereas the 1950s witnessed the establishment of apartheid’s key legislation and the National Party (NP) government’s gradual consolidation of power, the early 1960s marked a shift to a radicalized new phase of apartheid. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 came the banning of “unlawful organizations” (including the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress), the implementation of increasingly repressive laws, and the effective crushing of resistance for a decade. Anti-racist activists inside South Africa had drawn on the Nazi analogy since the early 1940s to clarify the nature of the system they were opposing, and, as they began to reconstitute their resistance efforts in exile, their diplomatic strategy relied in part on branding their struggle as “the most important moral battle in the world since the defeat of Nazism.”5 This was a formative period for the South African Jewish community’s identity and self-definition. A small and relatively young community (the bulk of immigrants having arrived at the turn of the century), it was still reeling from the devastation of its communal and spiritual “reservoir” in Eastern Europe, and it was negotiating the implications of that loss for Jewish existence at home and in the Diaspora. Almost unanimously supportive of the Zionist cause, it was also weighed down with genuine concern about Jewish safety in South Africa under the new political system, particularly given the Nazi-inspired antisemitism it had experienced in the preceding decades. As the government introduced the foundations of apartheid legislation and resistance gathered momentum, the Jewish community sought to establish its place in the political order, balancing existential uncertainties, political realism, and pragmatic communal survival strategies.6 Much of the recent historiography devoted to this community has focused on its responses to apartheid and on the extent to which fear of antisemitism can legitimately explain its failure to substantially oppose the government before the 1980s. Little detailed examination has been offered, however, of the nuanced and sometimes unexpected development of these responses over time. This article focuses on the transitional period when apartheid was still in the making and Jews were in the process of forging a viable post-Holocaust existence. It highlights a discrete moment during the war and immediate postwar years when it was commonplace for Jews to frame their responses to antisemitism (in Europe as well as in South Africa) with reference to a wider struggle for democracy and racial tolerance, in contrast to an increasingly narrow focus on Jewish concerns as the 1950s progressed. Although only a
handful of activist Jews explicitly compared South African racism with Nazism, as we shall see, it was quite acceptable for Jewish public figures and communal leaders, including representatives of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), prominent rabbis, politicians, and journalists to identify links between the struggle against antisemitism (Nazi and Nazi-inspired) and the broader battle against racist ideologies. The period in question witnessed emotional debate between politically polarized sections of the community as to whether and how Jews’ historical experience of oppression ought to inform their attitudes to broader questions of racism in the South African context. My findings illuminate aspects of the “responses to apartheid” debate, but I am ultimately concerned with the distinct question of how Jews perceived the implications of the Nazi past in relation to their present circumstances. This article documents the ways in which the Holocaust informed Jewish public discourse, situating this question within both the broader context of apartheid South Africa, where distinct discourses were taking shape, and the growing literature on Holocaust memory. I begin with a brief consideration of the concrete connections between Nazi Germany and South Africa, particularly Afrikaner nationalist ideology and leadership. These connections are not of themselves the article’s focus but rather constitute a backdrop against which the question of perceived links—how and why people subsequently invoked the analogy—can be developed. I will then consider the comparisons between Nazism and local racism drawn by anti-racist activists, including Jews, before detailing the shifting attitudes of the mainstream Jewish community. By “memory” I refer not only to commemorative gatherings and monuments but also to memorial culture broadly conceived. In what contexts did South Africans find it appropriate or valuable to invoke the Holocaust? Who chose to discuss it, and who to gloss over its recent occurrence? How did different groups interpret the implications of the Nazi past in relation to the local present? In exploring these questions I have drawn on wide-ranging primary sources, including speeches and commentaries intended for commemorative purposes, rabbinic sermons, minutes and reports of communal organizations, the Jewish and non-Jewish press, imaginative literature, historiography, and memoirs. Nazi influences in South Africa The impact of Nazism in South Africa during 1933–45 has been the subject of some debate, both scholarly and (perhaps more so) political. The relationship between Nazi ideology and Afrikaner nationalism—
[35] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[36] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
the broad political movement from which the NP and apartheid ultimately emerged—has been an issue of especially intense contestation, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish historiography from writing that itself participates in the process of shaping memory and discourse on the subject.7 For apartheid’s opponents, establishing local connections with wartime fascism was one way to explain the nature of the racist regime and the struggle against it, and a number of quasi-scholarly texts advancing this thesis were produced during the apartheid era.8 The regime’s defenders, by contrast, downplayed the Nazi influence as a passing flirtation with foreign ideologies. In the post-apartheid period, commentators across the political spectrum have minimized the historical links,9 gently disparaged the “hyperbole” employed by activists during the apartheid era,10 and stressed the continuing relevance of the analogy to South Africa’s ongoing efforts to confront its past.11 Distinct from these often polemical writings, Patrick Furlong’s more judicious source-based account reveals that, though apartheid South Africa was always quite distinct from Hitler’s Germany, Afrikaner nationalist politics were indeed influenced by ideas derived from Europe, particularly Nazi Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, though antisemitism had not been absent from South African life before this period, the 1930s saw increasing manifestations of explicitly political anti-Jewish behavior in a Nazi mold. In October 1933, just months after Hitler’s accession to power, the South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, better known as the Greyshirt Movement, was established under the leadership of Louis T. Weichardt. The most prominent and successful of a number of radical right “shirt” movements to arise at this time, it was openly pro-Nazi and drew on a “distinctively imported European variety of anti-Semitism.”12 By 1933, the Nazi party had already established local branches in South Africa and had begun to distribute substantial amounts of propaganda material. The popular Nazi-inspired Ossewabrandwag, an Afrikaner paramilitary movement, was established in 1938, and in 1940 Oswald Pirow founded the avowedly pro-fascist Nuwe Orde party.13 These were radical right-wing organizations, but their ideas resonated well into the mainstream. Jewish immigration to South Africa from Germany between 1934 and 1936 fuelled increasing radicalization in the Gesuiwerde National Party, the Afrikaner opposition to the ruling United Party coalition, and, by the 1938 election, antisemitism had become an integral aspect of its platform.14 In 1937, the Aliens Bill was introduced, largely to stem the influx of German-Jewish refugees.15 Nationalist newspapers minimized or ignored Germany’s ac-
tions, including its aggressive expansionist policies and violent anti-Jewish attacks like Kristallnacht, and the NP opposed the decision to enter the war against Germany in 1939. Parliament ultimately supported Prime Minister Jan Smuts’s effort only by a narrow majority of 80 to 67.16 In addition, some influential Afrikaner intellectuals studied in Germany, where they had direct contact with Nazi organizations and in some cases with high-ranking Nazi leaders.17 Although Afrikaner nationalism absorbed the influence of Nazi ideas, it is worth emphasizing that Nazism was never appropriated wholesale or without qualification and that apartheid, when implemented in 1948, became in fundamental ways a distinct ideological and political system. Significantly, however, one of the principal consequences of the association was the integration in the pre-apartheid period of antisemitism into the mainstream of South African politics, where previously that prejudice had been restricted largely to the realms of literary and cultural stereotyping.18 Moreover, it became distinct from the broader racist politics of the time. Even though prejudice against non-whites was widely shared among the white electorate, antisemitism became one of the means through which parties in the 1930s sought to lure right-leaning, chiefly Afrikaner voters and thus became (for this and other reasons) an issue of sustained attention. Whatever the precise nature of Afrikaner nationalism’s link with Nazi Germany, the Jewish community certainly perceived a profound threat, and it consistently emphasized the connection in attempting to mobilize responses from both Jews and non-Jews. In the June 1941 issue of Jewish Affairs, a monthly journal newly launched by the SAJBD, the editorial explained that Jews found themselves “the target of an attack planned and executed from Nazi headquarters in Germany and supported by local protagonists or dupes of Nazi doctrines.”19 The journal repeatedly emphasized not only that the Ossewabrandwag and the Nuwe Orde “frankly proclaim their allegiance to Nazi ideology” but also that the NP, “while paying lip service to democratic principles, in fact advocates an undemocratic Herrenvolk Republic, dominated by a Racialist group.” 20 Similar commentary by community leaders and in the Jewish press revealed an ongoing concern with antisemitic activity in the country and reiterated that anti-Jewish prejudice had “found a footing here through direct Nazi stimulus.” 21 At the same time as the South African Jewish community negotiated the menace of local antisemitism, it was also deeply concerned about the plight of European Jews under Nazi rule. Even before awareness began to emerge of the full scope of Nazi atrocities, there was extensive coverage of events in the Jewish press, and the community
[37] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[38] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
engaged in vigorous debate about how to help Jewish victims, from locating relatives to expressing protest and sending aid.22 One of the most important efforts was the establishment in March 1942 of a South African Jewish War Appeal, the primary aim of which was to render assistance to Jewish victims of Nazism.23 The SAJBD also sent several deputations to Smuts to address the admittance of more Jewish refugees to South Africa, and it urged him to put pressure on foreign governments to do more to assist the Jews.24 The unfolding events had a powerful personal impact on South African Jews, and in addition to aid efforts they began fairly early to organize commemorative gatherings. In 1936, less than half of the small community of 90,000 was South African–born; the bulk of immigrants had arrived from Lithuania during waves of migration between the 1880s and the introduction of restrictive legislation in 1930. They were profoundly concerned about the fate of friends and family left behind in Eastern Europe. Although immigration restrictions meant that relatively few refugees and, later, survivors came to South Africa, many early commemorative activities were initiated by the earlier immigrants. The first meeting was held in April 1942 in Johannesburg, and in December a “Day of Mourning” was called under the joint auspices of the SAJBD and the South African Zionist Federation.25 Packed synagogue services were held in the major centers of Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. Although the attendees were Jewish, the SAJBD’s intention in convening these meetings was in substantial part to draw the non-Jewish public’s attention to the unfolding catastrophe in Europe. As such, it endeavored to include a range of prominent non-Jewish figures, particularly government representatives and Christian clergymen, in the proceedings. Similar Days of Mourning were held in December 1943 and March 1945, marked again by public meetings at major centers. News reports of these early meetings reveal a shattered and grief-stricken community: “Women wept and looked dumb with agony,” reported The South African Leader in February 1943.26 “The Ghost of Hitler Is Haunting South Africa” The enormity of what was happening affected not just the Jewish community. Although South African Jews identified a link between events in Europe and the antisemitism they themselves were encountering, those opposed to discriminatory policies against non-whites also referred to the connections between Nazism and the racist scourge they
were fighting at home. In a manifesto adopted on August 26, 1943, the All African Convention stressed that, though Allied victory was a forgone conclusion, “the creed of race superiority” had not yet been defeated, particularly among the white rulers of South Africa “with views so similar to Hitler’s race theories.” 27 The Non-European Unity Movement invoked an even more extended comparison in its “Declaration to the Nations of the World” drafted in July 1945: “The peoples of the world who were horrified by the inhuman record of Nazism may be unaware of the fact that the Non-Europeans of South Africa live and suffer under a tyranny very little different from Nazidom.” 28 The document stressed that the “poison of racial superiority” was deeply ingrained in white society; blacks experienced the same restrictions and humiliations as European Jews, and, though there were no Buchenwalds, “the sadistic fury with which the Herrenvolk policeman belabours the Non-European . . . is comparable only to the brutality of the SS Guards.” 29 In sum, “The life of a Non-European is very cheap in South Africa. As cheap as the life of a Jew in Nazi Germany.”30 Comparisons of this kind were directed not just toward the outside world: internally focused discourse also framed segregationist policies with reference to Nazi concepts. A prominent example was the discussion surrounding the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill (1946), which restricted Indians’ property ownership rights and became popularly known as the “Ghetto Act” or “Ghetto Bill.” The Nazi connection was frequently elaborated, particularly during the passive resistance campaign mounted by the Natal, Transvaal, and other local Indian congresses.31 Addressing Parliament before the bill was passed, a representative of the South African Indian Congress likened the proposed legislation to the racial persecution of Jews and declared that “the legislation which we ask you to reject . . . contains all the elements of Hitler’s policy applied by a country that was Hitler’s enemy, to its quarter million Indian subjects.” 32 In a pamphlet published shortly after the bill was passed, President of the Transvaal Indian Congress Yusuf Dadoo similarly drew unambiguous links between Nazism and local white supremacy: “These rantings in our Parliament are not unfamiliar. The ghost of Hitler is haunting South Africa.”33 It is worth highlighting that these characterizations were directed not at the NP but at its predecessor, the United Party, which, though more moderate in its racial policies than apartheid later became, was nonetheless firmly predicated on white dominance. Apartheid radicalized and further institutionalized racism and segregation, and its links with Nazism certainly rendered the analogy even more potent
[39] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[40] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
after 1948, but the conceptual connections with South African racism were nonetheless invoked earlier. Thus, an obvious continuity existed in the discourse of anti-racist activists before and during the apartheid years. In a variety of local forums from the early 1950s, for example, Nelson Mandela made repeated references to the “Hitlerite” Nationalist government, concern about a “future Gestapo,” and apartheid’s “Herrenvolk policies”: The Nationalist Government have frequently denied that they are a fascist Government inspired by the theories of the National-Socialist Party of Hitlerite Germany. Yet the declaration they make, the laws they pass and the entire policy they pursue clearly confirm this point. 34
The connection between the “Nats” and the Nazis was widely cited by apartheid’s opponents from the early years of NP rule.35 In the 1940s and 1950s, this rhetoric tended to focus on parallel policies of racial discrimination, such as legal inequalities or restrictions on employment and residence, but occasionally the Nazi camps were also invoked to rhetorical effect. In one of a series of articles written for the journal Liberation in the mid-1950s, Mandela warned: “The spectre of Belsen and Buchenwald is haunting South Africa.”36 Among the ranks of anti-racist activists were numerous Jews, some of whom echoed these comparisons.37 Although Jews constituted a disproportionate percentage among white activists in the struggle, few motivated their involvement in explicitly Jewish terms, particularly in this early period. Nonetheless, it is interesting that recent discussions have paid little attention to the impact of Jewish historical experience in accounting for Jewish radicalism. Though clearly not the only factor, the history of Jewish persecution in Europe was the stimulus to a number of South African Jewish activists.38 In his memoir Into Exile (1963), Ronald Segal, editor of the influential journal Africa South, referred to apartheid’s “spiritual predecessor, the Germany of the Nazis” and drew numerous parallels between the two systems. Although the South African government had not yet shown itself to be as brutal as Nazism, Segal warned that, if seriously threatened, it would be unlikely to “reveal more pressing moral qualms than the Nazism which South Africa’s present Prime Minister and Minister of Justice both so passionately admired.” 39 The educator Franz Auerbach, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, repeatedly pointed to the “similarities between some present features of life in South Africa and life under Hitler.” Like other Jewish activists, he pointedly invoked the comparison in urging his coreligionists to pro-
test apartheid’s injustices: “To be silent is to betray our history, our religion and our duty to the land that gave us refuge.”40 For the most part, the mainstream Jewish community did not identify such explicit connections.41 As the historian Gideon Shimoni has shown, most Jewish immigrants to South Africa quickly conformed to the established social system and “became accustomed to regarding blacks as inferiors fit solely to be servants and unskilled laborers.”42 In the 1930s, Jews generally perceived the antisemitism they were experiencing to be a different category than racism against non-whites; terms like “racial antagonism” often referred solely to conflicts among white groups. In the debates around Jewish immigration restrictions during that period, few, not even anti-racist liberals, made connections between antisemitism and South African racism more broadly.43 For a brief moment during the war and in its aftermath, however, Jewish discourse began to gesture tentatively but perceptibly toward the links between antisemitism and discrimination against other persecuted groups. To be sure, much community discourse continued to focus on matters of Jewish concern and conceived of Jews’ position in South Africa primarily in the context of white society. Nonetheless, from the early 1940s the community consistently framed its battle against antisemitism as inextricably connected to the struggle against racist, anti-democratic forces in South Africa, seen explicitly against the background of Nazi racism. Although the motivations of this discourse were not always clear or uncomplicated, as elaborated below, the mere fact of its presence has been overlooked in existing historical accounts as well as in community memory and is worth emphasizing particularly in light of developments in subsequent decades. In the international context, the struggle against Nazism was presented not as a solely Jewish concern but as one that ought to concern all civilized nations, a reading that was undoubtedly motivated in part by the desire to mobilize all possible forces of opposition.44 Within South Africa, antisemitism similarly began to be linked with racist attitudes more generally. The second issue of Jewish Affairs in July 1941 featured a commentary on the political struggle in South Africa, especially the steady growth of the “Herrenvolk” principle in Afrikaner nationalist politics. “The principle of liberty is one and indivisible,” it opined: An attack on the rights of one group leads inevitably to an attack on the rights of all. The Nazis assailed the Jewish group; the assault spread rapidly to other groups until the world was plunged into war. The principle of liberty, on which the fate of nations depends, governs the fate of
[41] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[42] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
groups within the nation as well. Compromise with freedom by depriving one section of its rights, and the rights of every section are placed in jeopardy. This is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in South Africa’s domestic politics today.45
From the early 1940s, Jewish leaders and public intellectuals, including individuals representing the SAJBD, repeatedly declared that antisemitism was inseparable from other forms of prejudice in South Africa and that the fight against racism—which in its local manifestations bore clear ideological connections with Nazism—was part of the same broad struggle for democracy and freedom. SAJBD chairman Gerald Lazarus affirmed in September 1941 that “we no longer wage a sporadic battle on the Jewish front, but are privileged to assist in the defence of the inalienable Rights of Man”; in this he was referring not only to the global battle against Nazism but also to the “struggle against narrow racialism” at home.46 An editorial in Jewish Affairs in April 1943 presented two choices for South Africa’s future: “a reactionary society dominated by a Herrenvolk” or “a constructive nationalism based upon respect for differences, mutual co-operation and a determination to honour our responsibilities towards the less privileged sections of the population.”47 The editor’s position was clear: the “racial doctrines” of Nazism needed to be eradicated, and in achieving this goal “the interests of all are inter-dependent: the good of each is the good of all.”48 This principle was also articulated in the “Nine-Point Programme” proposed in early 1944, which represented the “guiding principles” underlying the SAJBD’s work for “better race relations in South Africa.” It affirmed that the “fight against anti-Semitism is part of the defence of democracy and of freedom; and only if the larger victory is won is there hope of eliminating (or mitigating) anti-Semitism.”49 To be sure, the precise meaning and implications of this discourse are not always easy to gauge. Although South African Jews made connections between the discrimination they suffered and racism more broadly, they often continued to construe racial cooperation and equality in distinct terms for the “European” and “non-European” sectors of society.50 Part of the motivation for framing the fight against antisemitism as part of a larger struggle against racism was an attempt to urge non-Jews to assist in an effort that the Jewish community recognized it could not wage alone. In this regard, it is noteworthy that early commemorations included a small but esteemed non-Jewish guest list; by the 1950s, they were directed almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. A related explanation, not unique to the South African context, is that Jews underplayed persecution directed against them so as to avoid in-
flaming antisemitism or creating the impression that the country was fighting for an exclusively Jewish cause. Beyond these motivations, it is not always clear what was intended by the language of “progressiveness” itself. It was certainly distinct from activists’ rhetoric, which, as we have seen, identified parallels between local and Nazi racist policies in order to advocate political opposition. What was meant by “democracy” and “racial tolerance”? Some pronouncements were more explicit than others, but exhortations to fight racism seldom mentioned non-whites or specific policies directed against them. The SAJBD’s “Nine-Point Programme” highlighted its aim “to promote inter-racial and inter-faith goodwill” but clarified that, though Jews should “adopt an enlightened policy,” “it would be futile for them to be far in advance of public opinion.”51 An editorial in Jewish Affairs titled “Racial Intolerance” similarly asserted that All Jews ought to be particularly sensitive to unjust treatment meted out to minorities . . . . Jews cannot and must not side with policies which are unjust or oppressive. But here a practical dilemma arises. The advocacy of racial policies which run far ahead of public opinion often has the opposite effect of that intended and merely strengthens the hands of the reactionary forces by providing them with additional propaganda “ammunition.” South Africa is not in a mood for very advanced programmes—certainly not for the obliteration or weakening of the colour line in social or political life. At this stage, the most hopeful prospect for advance seems to be in the amelioration of the economic lot of the nonEuropean groups—improvement in their food, housing, health, education, etc. It would seem that it is by working towards those objectives that progressives can to-day make their most realistic contribution to South Africa’s racial problems. 52
The notion of “ameliorating” the circumstances of non-whites was a common trope in liberal discourse of this period and again reveals a clear distinction between perceptions of antisemitism and anti-black racism. Elsewhere, too, Jews drew attention to the features that distinguished antisemitism from “other forms of racial and sectional prejudice” in the country, even while emphasizing that the fight against it was part of a broader anti-racist struggle. 53 Jewish observers were, at times, doubtless echoing the claims of Afrikaner ideologists that apartheid was not racist and offered separate but equal development for all racial groups; the language of democracy and racial goodwill thus needs to be understood in this context.54 Addressing briefly the SAJBD’s “liberal utterances” in the immediate postwar years, Shimoni maintains that, though circumstances
[43] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[44] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
motivated the SAJBD to cooperate with “the liberal, democratic sector in politics,” at base it remained true to its long-standing policy of noninvolvement in politics save where the rights of Jews were directly threatened. Indeed, it reiterated this policy increasingly frequently and insistently as the 1950s progressed. This explanation is intended to mitigate the criticism that the SAJBD later made a “hypocritical volte-face” in focusing exclusively on Jewish issues. Ultimately, Shimoni concludes, “the alliance with liberal political forces turned out to be a temporary linkup based on convergence of interests, rather than a permanent alliance based on principle.”55 This explanation holds some legitimacy, but it is worth probing more deeply the extent to which later Jewish communal discourse constitutes a shift from these early attitudes. In the first place, the mere presence of this discourse in the early to late 1940s has not been widely recognized either in historiography or in community memory. Its existence is significant for the ideas themselves, but perhaps yet more important for the fact that they were raised regularly by mainstream leaders and public figures. The repeated linking of antisemitism with the broader struggle against racism also cannot be explained solely in terms of expedient self-interest. Though certainly driven in part by community interests, such pronouncements reveal a degree of concern with broader issues of racial discrimination, even if not in the most radical terms.56 They are rooted, explicitly or implicitly, in the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust, and they suggest some acknowledgment that Jews’ historical experience of persecution, culminating in the recent genocide, should inform their responses to racism in the wider world. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, these broader implications did not necessarily preclude or eclipse a simultaneous focus on Jewish concerns, such as providing assistance to displaced persons or motivating the need for a Jewish homeland. The ability to focus on the universal as well as the Jewish implications of Nazi antisemitism presents a contrast to the ways in which the Holocaust came to inform Jewish communal identity in subsequent decades. Moreover, it is striking to note that this discourse proliferated during the years when the community was arguably most intimidated and genuinely threatened by Afrikaner antisemitism. For all their ambiguity and tentativeness, even these more broadly oriented gestures faded from view in later decades as the community settled into an increasingly comfortable relationship with the apartheid political order. During the early postwar period, the wider outlook that had been evident during the war years continued to find expression in the community’s nascent memory culture. Communal leaders emphasized
that, though Nazism had been defeated, its echoes persisted in South Africa, particularly in the NP’s racist rhetoric. In response to the 1946 “Ghetto Act,” some people warned that Jews in particular, because of their personal experience of discrimination, should not tolerate prejudice even where it only targeted other groups: “It had cost the Jewish people six million lives to prove that appeasement does not pay.”57 In August 1947, the SAJBD’s congress passed a resolution titled “Jews Must Fight for Rights of All,” which affirmed: The second year since the cessation of hostilities has abundantly shown that Fascism has not yet been extirpated and the danger exists in various countries including South Africa that reactionary forces will come to power. Congress therefore finds it necessary to record that the fate of the Jewish population is bound up with that of the progressive forces. Congress calls upon all Jews in South Africa to participate in the struggle against Fascism and reaction, and to fight for justice and rights for all peoples without distinction of colour and race. 58
As the 1948 election approached, an anonymous commentator stressed the “direct line of evolution” running from “the Hitler worshippers” to “the impenitent racial reactionaries of today.”59 “Two years after the destruction of the physical hulk of Hitlerism,” he wrote, “South Africa is nearing a political battle where the self-same issues will again be fought out.” The obvious response, for Jews and non-Jews alike, should be political opposition to the NP and its policy of apartheid.60 The Advent of Apartheid and the Lessons of the Holocaust When the NP won a dramatic and unexpected victory in the 1948 election, the Jewish reaction was predictably one of shock and anxiety. As journalist Benjamin Pogrund put it, “The unthinkable had happened. The Nazi supporters . . . were in office.”61 In the wake of the election, the community was concerned first and foremost with monitoring antisemitism and determining what the position of Jews would be in the new apartheid order. In his opening speech to the SAJBD’s biennial congress in May 1949, however, Chairman Simon Kuper reported that “there has not been any discrimination against Jews living in South Africa” and that “all the signs point to a resolve that racial discrimination of this kind shall be avoided.” Although critical of the NP’s continuing ban on Jewish membership in its Transvaal branch, Kuper referred to Afrikaner antisemitism in veiled
[45] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[46] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
terms, attributing it to temporary “foreign” influences and downplaying its manifestations to “certain quarters” of the population. Prime Minister D. F. Malan had affirmed he would not stand for discrimination against “Europeans,” and Kuper’s message was one of assurance “that Jewish citizens will co-operate fully in all policies aimed at bringing benefit to the South African population as a whole.”62 The Nationalist victory in fact ushered in an era of dramatically improved relations between Jews and Afrikaners, and antisemitism abated almost immediately after the new government took office. In its 1949 report, the SAJBD affirmed that no antisemitic policies had been pursued and that, thus far, there had been no anti-Jewish public references. It also reported that the Nuwe Orde, the Greyshirts, and the Ossewabrandwag were experiencing “a new nadir.” In general, Afrikaner antisemitism seemed to have dissipated in the wake of a new push for unity among “Europeans.” As Weichardt put it, “We place the saving of White South Africa first.”63 In subsequent years, while continuing to track any manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiment, the SAJBD was able to report that apart from some minor incidents “the general political atmosphere was free of anti-Semitism”; indeed, “the press on many occasions published sympathetic items of Jewish interest and helped to create a friendly atmosphere in inter-group relations.”64 During this period of adjustment to apartheid, the Holocaust continued to feature on the Jewish public agenda and to inform the community’s outlook on the South African as well as the global context. Jews remained vigilant of the government’s attitude, but they also recognized the tectonic shifts that had occurred in the wider Jewish world and the need to develop viable community responses. During the war, when attention was focused primarily on the unfolding catastrophe in Europe, community discourse had begun to point intermittently to the need to strengthen Jewish cultural and spiritual life in the face of an uncertain future. After 1945, Jews increasingly focused their energies on community matters like education and religious life, which had become pressing priorities in light of the “destruction of our European reservoir.”65 Hasia Diner shows that recognition of this loss imposed on American Jews a special duty to sustain Jewish culture. The Holocaust brought them “into the center of the Jewish world, asking them to become custodians of the Jewish future.”66 The challenge to the South African community was rather different: small and isolated, it sought ways to adjust to the devastating loss of the European Jewish centers that had sustained its existence and to establish workable modes of functioning in their absence. From 1948, as elsewhere, the
community also engaged in intense discussion about the implications of the newly formed Jewish state for the future of the Diaspora. Were Jewish communities outside Israel still viable or necessary? What was their role in this newly transformed Jewish world? In the late 1940s, South African Jews were thus negotiating not only unsettling local developments but also momentous shifts in the Jewish world order. Given these changes, it is perhaps unsurprising that the community’s rhetoric began gradually to narrow its focus to Jewish concerns. Well into the 1950s, however, there was continuing recognition by some communal leaders, particularly religious leaders, of the connections between racial discrimination in South Africa and the Jews’ own history of persecution.67 One such figure was Rabbi Solomon Rappaport, who had fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 and arrived in South Africa in 1943, to serve for over 30 years as rabbi of the Pine Street Synagogue and in the Department of Hebrew at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.68 Although Rappaport focused on the insights of Jewish doctrine into race relations, he also consistently emphasized the implications of Jewish historical experience. In Rabbinic Thoughts on Race, he argued that The Jewish people must be ever mindful of the fact that it had been treated in Nazi Germany as an outcast and subjected to systematic genocide on account of alleged biological deficiency of the Semites for which there was no remedy in the eyes of the Aryan master race. The Jewish people should scrupulously refrain from becoming accessories to any acts of oppression, injustice or humiliation committed in the name of race, and remain faithful to the ethical fundamentals of their religious heritage.69
Another outspoken leader, Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, similarly made reference to the Nazi past in an address delivered to the Students’ Zionist Association at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in early 1954. Rabinowitz urged young Jews to reject the notion of academic segregation on the grounds that No people has suffered more from academic segregation and discrimination than has the Jewish people . . . . It was in [the early 1880s] that in Czarist Russia the first legislation was enacted severely restricting the percentage of Jews in the Universities, and the connection between that and the complete elimination of Jews from every branch of academic activity in Nazi Germany in 1938 is a direct and causal one . . . . Let the Jew think twice, and think of his own bitter, painful experience before he lightly accedes to discrimination and segregation on any grounds of colour, race, creed or birth.70
[47] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[48] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
A more controversial figure was the Hungarian rabbi Dr. André Ungar, who arrived in South Africa in January 1955 to take up a post at the Jewish Reform Congregation in Port Elizabeth. Ungar was openly committed to the cause of social justice, maintaining that Jews should unequivocally oppose racial discrimination and not deign to accommodate it even where they did not constitute its immediate target. Himself a Holocaust survivor (he had survived thanks to false papers in Budapest), he explicitly urged Jewish opposition to apartheid with reference to the Nazi past. Speaking in November 1956 at a public meeting called by the Group Areas Action Committee, he denounced the Group Areas Act as “a despicable atrocity,” comparing forced removals to his own experience of ghettoization in Hungary, and told the mixed audience that “Hitler is again on the march” in South Africa.71 In an article titled “The Abdication of a Community,” Ungar turned his criticism onto the Jewish community, which he argued was neglecting its moral duty to oppose apartheid despite the obvious lessons of its historical experience. Given the relatively recent arrival of Jewish immigrants to South Africa, he wrote, Personal memories of oppression must still be vivid in the minds of very many. There can hardly be a Jewish family in South Africa that has not lost near relations when Hitler’s racialism reached its logical culmination in mass slaughter. Both through cruel oppression in the tumult of many centuries, and through recent personal experiences and involvements, the Jews of South Africa should be historically and psychologically well equipped to recognize oppression and persecution whenever they occur, stand by the victims, and fight against those who by action or connivance, through inhumanity or stupidity or both, help maintain such a system.72
Ungar’s pronouncements drew increasing complaints from his congregation and the SAJBD, and he announced his resignation in October 1956, shortly before the government also revoked his temporary residence permit. A flurry of correspondence to both Jewish and non-Jewish newspapers around this time reveals a range of heated, polarized responses to Ungar’s expulsion. A majority of Jews seem to have celebrated, or at least not been unduly distressed by, his departure; numerous letter writers portrayed him as a young, foreign rabbi who had little understanding of South Africa’s complex racial problems and who had radically overstepped the mark with his “hot- tempered” attacks against the government.73 In a letter to the editor of the Evening Post in December 1956, Solly Yellin from Port Elizabeth claimed that Ungar’s comparison of South Africa to Nazi Germany
“is the greatest insult that can be heaped upon the memory of the multitude of victims taken by Nazi barbarism, among whom our own 6,000,000 martyrs perished.” 74 The communal and religious leadership, too, dissociated itself from him.75 By contrast, those who defended Ungar’s stance frequently reiterated his comparisons between Nazism and apartheid, particularly in criticizing the Jewish community’s lack of support. In a letter to the S. A. Jewish Times, Mrs. Pessa Weinberg from Pietermaritzburg found it “hard to believe that, having recently mourned the passing of millions of Jews at the hands of Nazi tyranny, we can so easily close our eyes to the oppression and injustice which emanates from the ideology of the National Government in South Africa.” 76 As these highly charged responses suggest, comparisons between Nazism and apartheid became increasingly less acceptable in mainstream Jewish discourse in the 1950s. Although occasional comments continued to surface, by the end of the decade references to the lessons of Jewish history in the context of apartheid had by and large faded from the public realm, remaining the preserve of a few outspoken individuals.77 There was a tendency, instead, to explain the Afrikaner antisemitism of the preceding decades—which, as we have seen, had been repeatedly attributed to Nazi influences—to more nebulous “alien doctrines of racialism” that had since receded from mainstream South A frican life.78 “National Socialism did not succeed in establishing itself as an Afrikaans way of life,” confirmed one of the earliest reports of the executive council of the SAJBD during the apartheid period.79 Referring to the eventual removal of the NP’s ban on Jewish membership in its Transvaal branch in 1951, SAJBD general secretary Gus Saron assured deputies that those “foreign ideologies” that “had their origin on alien soil” had now “largely disappeared from the public scene.”80 In his Solution for South Africa: A Jewish View, journalist Henry Katzew wrote: “It is recognised by Jews today that when times are out of joint men become less than themselves. The Afrikaner himself was a victim of the world’s unhappy spirit.”81 Frequent references were made to the government’s friendly attitude toward Jews and the abatement of antisemitism from public life. To be sure, some doubts were raised particularly in the early apartheid years about the genuineness of the NP’s shift, and the language of “freedom and racial tolerance” did not disappear entirely, though it became increasingly ambiguous. But while the SAJBD remained vigilant of any antisemitic manifestations, its reports focused on the fringe activities of the Ossewabrandwag, the Nuwe Orde, and marginal individuals involved in distributing antisemitic material. Given
[49] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[50] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
that one of the Jewish communal leadership’s prime concerns was to establish cordial relations with the government, the tendency to downplay NP antisemitism and especially its Nazi connections was unsurprising. Indeed, as Furlong has suggested, one of the ways in which the NP itself sought to establish its respectability after 1948 was by distinguishing between mainstream Afrikaner nationalism and the radical right-wing organizations that were explicitly pro-Nazi (though this is a distinction that his research clearly belies).82 South African Jewish historiography, which saw a number of important publications in the 1950s, echoed these trends. Gus Saron and Louis Hotz’s multiauthored volume The Jews in South Africa (1955) and Chief Rabbi Israel Abrahams’s The Birth of a Community (1955)— which, according to Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, had a formative impact on South African Jewry’s communal memory in the apartheid period—presented “a questionable understanding of the community’s origins, development and character,” not least in respect to antisemitism.83 Both studies emphasized the Jewish contribution to society while stressing the community’s ability to maintain a distinctive “racial” identity (a subject reinforced in the Jewish press). Both also highlighted the government’s and, more broadly, Afrikaners’ friendly attitude toward Jews, and they incorporated laudatory comments about the community by Prime Minister Malan.84 Saron and Hotz’s collection explained local antisemitism as an aberration of the 1930s and 1940s, resulting from the import into South Africa of “foreign ideologies, fascist theories, and group hatreds.” Many of those affected by these doctrines “were unaware of their source,” and the “real meaning of Nazism and of its doctrines and aims was misunderstood or ignored.” Moreover, anti-Jewish sentiments were exacerbated partly by “war-time hysteria.” Although the text did not evade the issue of Afrikaner antisemitism, its portrayal was careful and muted, and it differentiated between the NP and “fully fledged National Socialist organizations” like the Ossewabrandwag and the Nuwe Orde. Despite some tentativeness, the picture it portrayed was of a ruling party that had substantially changed. The book did not address the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish community, and barely broached racial issues beyond conveying the standard SAJBD line of political noninvolvement.85 Mentions of Nazism in the Jewish public sphere were increasingly unconnected with South Africa. The press reported widely on the fate of Jewish displaced persons and the developing situation in Palestine, but already by the late 1940s the connections between Nationalists and Nazis that had earlier been so emphatically stressed were
hardly in evidence. Jewish newspapers made reference to the Nazi period in relation to contemporary antisemitism in Europe, concern about West German rearmament and the failure of denazification, or the growing literature on the genocide and the experiences of survivors. Some observers also began to link the Holocaust with the threat of secularism and assimilation. This was a key focus, for example, of Abrahams’s sermons in the 1950s and early 1960s. In his conception, memory of the Holocaust served both to demonstrate the seriousness of the threat of assimilation and to motivate Jews to seek the only and ultimate salvation in a “reborn and reinvigorated Judaism.” 86 Formal Holocaust commemoration remained a regular item on the communal agenda, and by 1960 the SAJBD could proudly report that “in South Africa the occasion is better observed than in many other countries.”87 The SAJBD gradually assumed control of planning and organization, and it discouraged individual organizations from holding their own memorial events. A specially convened subcommittee took on responsibility for coordination, publicizing the gatherings and “remind[ing] communal bodies throughout the land when it is time to begin planning their special form of observance,” providing appropriate materials, sending speakers, and supplying lesson plans for teachers. Young people began increasingly to participate as a result of directed efforts, particularly in independent meetings organized by the SAJBD Youth Department and the Zionist Youth Council.88 In addition to commemorative gatherings, the community put notable effort into memorial-building in the postwar period, in contrast to other Jewish communities outside of Europe.89 The first substantial initiatives were a memorial consecrated in 1955 at the Pinelands Road Hebrew Cemetery in Cape Town and, more significantly, a monument unveiled at the West Park Cemetery in Johannesburg under the auspices of the SAJBD. At an emotional ceremony in May 1959, the vast audience that had gathered for the monument’s dedication was addressed by Israeli Knesset member Rabbi Mordecai Nurock, who had come to South Africa for the purpose. Portions of the ceremony were broadcast on both the English and the Afrikaans transmissions of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The initiative enjoyed overwhelming community support, and the monument played host to subsequent annual gatherings in Johannesburg.90 The discourse of formal commemoration tended to emphasize several inwardly focused themes, centering on the notion of Jewish self-reliance. In keeping with the practice of Jewish communities worldwide, commemoration was identified with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The heroism of the young ghetto fighters was the over-
[51] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[52] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
whelming focus, unambiguously linked with the reborn “new Jew” of Israel who relied on his own strength and defenses in preserving the Jewish future. In 1949, Rabbi Dr. M. C. Weiler declared at a Johannesburg gathering commemorating the uprising’s sixth anniversary: The new Jew that was born in the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto helped to forge the State of Israel and the new spirit that has become part and parcel of the Jewish nation . . . . The new Jew is alive and vital. He stands ready to defend his people. This Jew had won the battle of Israel—a battle that began in Warsaw. The Jews of the world have a new slogan, “No More Treblinkas.” This spirit we need here in South Africa in order to strengthen our ranks against reaction both internal and external.91
As the quote’s final sentence implies, the underlying motivation for Jewish self-defense was continuing Jewish vulnerability, and speakers warned repeatedly of the antisemitic dangers that Jews faced in the post-Nazi era. Jews would no longer passively accept persecution, nor would they wait for the world to come to their rescue. If the overriding and ongoing concern was Jewish security, the obvious lesson to be learned from the Holocaust was that only defiant self-reliance, particularly in the form of Israel, could ensure Jewish existence.92 The Holocaust and Zionism were closely connected throughout the apartheid years, coming to constitute the two “central pillar[s] of South African Jewry’s civil religion.” 93 Zionism had been the dominant political ideology since the early days of Jewish communal existence in South Africa, never significantly challenged by rivals such as the Bund, Agudath Israel, or Reform Judaism as was the case elsewhere. After the advent of apartheid, which coincided with the establishment of the Jewish state, Zionism continued to be the overwhelming locus of communal identification. To a significant degree, South African Zionism developed in tandem with the community’s experiences and perceptions of antisemitism. Zionist commitment saw substantial growth in the 1930s and, after the Holocaust, became the focal point of the community’s self-image, rooted in the powerful memory of recent Jewish persecution. Zionist commitment also reinforced the community’s relationship with the apartheid regime, both because of the minority group identity it affirmed and because of the relationship it helped foster between Jews and Afrikaners. Malan officially recognized Israel in May 1949, and in 1953 he was the first head of government to visit the state while in office. Beyond the diplomatic relationship, which remained low-level in the 1950s, it became “commonplace” for journalists, clergymen, and intellectuals to commend Israel as “a model for the
Afrikaner”; Malan himself frequently expressed his admiration for the young state’s achievements.94 It is thus unsurprising that Holocaust commemoration was substantially shaped by Zionist involvement. Early meetings were conceived as joint commemorations for “the martyrdom of Jewish victims of the Hitler terror and the heroism and sacrifice of the Jewish fighters for freedom in Europe and in Israel during the War of Liberation.” 95 In later years, when separate but closely timed events were held to celebrate Yom Hashoah Vehagevura (Day of Holocaust and Heroism) and Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day), speakers and organizers made frequent reference to the binding connection between them. Keynote addresses at memorial ceremonies were given by Israeli ambassadors, local Zionist leaders, and Israeli academics. Zionist organizations often assisted in coordinating events, and programs regularly included youth movement presentations in Hebrew. Many of the wartime gatherings had already carried a strong Zionist message, stressing the importance of Palestine and appealing to the international community to allow Jews to reestablish themselves in their ancient homeland. Commemorative events in subsequent years continued to emphasize similar themes, portraying Israel as a “living memorial to the martyrs” and the only lasting solution to antisemitism after the Holocaust.96 The focus on Jewish self-reliance was motivated in part by reference to the world’s failure to respond to the persecution of the Jews. At the first nationwide Day of Mourning held on December 29, 1942, the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation denounced the indifference of nations to the Jews’ plight and urged South Africa to assist refugees.97 In the postwar period, speakers continued to condemn the “indifference of the world to the Jewish tragedy,” charging that millions of Jews went to their deaths while “the world stood by and watched.”98 The tone of these statements was frequently harsh and accusatory: at the 1953 gathering, Rabinowitz reminded his audience that, during the Nazi era, “the world was divided into two camps; those who . . . did the killing, and those who passively stood by and watched.” 99 One obvious conclusion of the world’s failure to help the Jews was the need for a strong Jewish state. On occasion, however, the lesson of bystander inaction bore direct implications for the local South African context—though not, significantly, the struggle against apartheid. For some, the battle for the Warsaw Ghetto was a reminder that “whatever faced the Jewish people in the Union[,] they should approach the coming events with the same spirit and fortitude that these fighters had done.”100 For others, the world’s contemporary
[53] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[54] Jewish Social Studies
response to apartheid—which “was not following a policy of racial discrimination which involved the extermination of a people”—was merely a reinforcement of its lack of concern for Jews: “Though the world professed to be shocked by what was happening in South Africa to-day, the whole of civilised mankind had stood by during the war and had allowed a third of the Jewish people to perish.”101
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Conclusion Memory cultures are difficult to pin down, finding expression as they do in such diverse forums and at so many levels of a community’s private and public discourse. This article has highlighted a subtle but perceptible shift in how South African Jews invoked the Nazi past before and after the advent of apartheid, from a more broadly oriented discourse in the 1940s to one that increasingly foregrounded Jewish concerns, particularly Zionism, in the 1950s. It is worth reiterating that, throughout the period in question, relatively few Jews were willing to identify direct parallels between antisemitism and anti-black racism in South Africa. For a short-lived but significant moment, however, it was commonplace and uncontroversial to assert that the struggle against anti-Jewish prejudice was allied with a broader progressive struggle against racism—a point made not only by individual activists and observers but also by rabbis, journalists, politicians, and other mainstream communal leaders. Of course the boundaries are inevitably indistinct, and ambiguities remain. Alongside these pronouncements in the 1940s, Jews expressed ongoing concern about the fate of Jews in Europe, the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and local antisemitism. Indeed, all of these were motivating factors for the language of democracy and racial tolerance (itself often only suggestive and indeterminate). After 1948, a memory discourse linking the Holocaust with the struggle against apartheid continued to emerge both from anti-racist activists and from Jewish religious leaders, even as the SAJBD began perceptibly to modify its rhetoric. Formal commemoration itself made little reference to the local context throughout the period under discussion. It is nonetheless significant that, where links were made between Nazism and South African racism, they tended to be before the advent of apartheid. As racism became even more repressive and institutionalized under the NP, both Afrikaners and Jews for different reasons played down the connections, whereas resistance movements increasingly invoked them. By the end of the 1950s, the Holocaust had come
chiefly to function for the mainstream community as an impetus for motivating Jewish cultural, religious, and national existence. The case of South Africa adds a valuable dimension to the growing literature on Holocaust memory, illuminating in particular how the Nazi past has informed perceptions and understandings of racism in the postwar world, for Jews as well as non-Jews. It also strengthens the growing recognition in historiography that the immediate postwar years were characterized by anything but silence about the genocide. Although the Eichmann trial and 1967 war affected memory cultures in significant ways, particularly intensifying how remembrance was publicized and politicized, the Holocaust was substantively incorporated into Jewish as well as broader national discourses from 1945 and even earlier.102 In South Africa, Nazism and its local connections had been a topic of discussion throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and the implications of the genocide for the local situation began to be considered while it was still happening. Regarding Jewish memory in particular, some trends evident in South Africa echo worldwide patterns. In common with Jews elsewhere in the Diaspora, the South African community was keenly aware that the spiritual and cultural “reservoir” in Eastern Europe had been destroyed. It was now confronted not only with the need to reconstruct practical aspects of its functioning and organization but also with the more challenging task of reconceptualizing its priorities, values, and fundamental identity. Unlike their American counterparts, South African Jews were not faced with the responsibility of becoming the new “custodians of the Jewish future”; they were nonetheless enduring the same tectonic shifts in the Jewish world and struggling with their position as a small outpost community far from sources of Jewish sustenance. In a related vein, South African Jews shared with other communities the challenge, after 1948, of adjusting to the existence of a Jewish state and negotiating the altered role of the Diaspora. One obvious implication of the Holocaust was thus the need to reorient and restore Jewish existence, though as elsewhere there was widespread debate as to how precisely this should be pursued. The local context, of course, posed particular challenges for Jews, and their memory narratives were accordingly distinct from trends elsewhere. Some South Africans, both Jews and non-Jews, invoked the Holocaust in order to protest racial injustices, but for the mainstream community it came to serve primarily as a touchstone for talking about Jewish national survival, with little if any reference to the South African context. The gradual rapprochement between Jews and Afrikaners was facilitated in part by this willful amnesia about the Nazi period.103 The
[55] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[56] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
narrative of Jewish victimhood and its corollary, support for Israel, also fit comfortably with apartheid’s emphasis on separate development, which Claudia Braude maintains the community substantially internalized.104 One of the challenges for American Jews was preserving minority group consciousness while integrating into the larger society, as Eric Goldstein has suggested, but the South African case did not present a similar dilemma.105 In fact, the apartheid context was conducive to a narrowing focus on Jewish life and welfare, as Saron recognized in The Jews in South Africa: “The general cultural and political climate in South Africa, which emphasizes the separateness of the various racial and cultural groups of the population, favours the perpetuation of a Jewish group existence.”106 These trends provide a framework within which to consider the impact of fear on South African Jewish responses to apartheid, an issue that has surfaced repeatedly in historiography but not yet been sufficiently explored. The consensus—with little differentiation over five decades of Nationalist rule—has long been that the community’s responses were shaped by “deep-seated fears” of Nazi-inspired Afrikaner antisemitism, even if this was quickly relegated to a fringe right-wing element when the new government took office in 1948. Although Jews may not have liked what they saw, they “felt themselves to be hostage to Afrikaner nationalist goodwill” and “did not feel sufficiently secure of their own position to voice their protest.”107 Some younger critics skeptically maintain that the threat of antisemitism was a convenient justification for growing indifference to apartheid’s injustices. Braude’s frank judgment is that Holocaust memory frequently functioned “to divert attention from the political reality in South Africa” and that the refusal to oppose racism “would come to have far less to do with Jewish fears of potential anti-Semitism than with the benefits of white life in South Africa.”108 Both of these arguments hold some legitimacy at different points during the period in question, but it is worth probing more deeply the nature of Jewish vulnerability before, during, and after apartheid. Apart from the immediate menace of antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s, early patterns of Holocaust memory suggest that historians have not sufficiently appreciated the extent of Nazism’s emotional impact. At commemorative gatherings during and after the war, deeply felt sentiments of anguish were expressed by a community composed in large part of immigrants from Lithuania and first-generation South Africans; many, if not most, grieved for family and friends left behind in a country where 95 percent of its Jewry perished. The anguish was compounded by the realization that this small community at the southern
tip of Africa had been left suddenly bereft of its spiritual and communal center and uncertain of its identity and future. Considered against this background, the increasing emphasis on issues of Jewish concern in the community’s memory culture cannot be explained simply as an expedient means of justifying its silence in the face of apartheid or solely as the product of fear. To be sure, Jews shared the prejudices of many white South Africans, and already in this early period they had begun to enjoy the affluence and privileges afforded by apartheid— particularly economic opportunities—with few serious crises of conscience.109 Yet memory cultures are seldom merely products of political contrivance.110 Jewish memory of the Holocaust deflected from a local context that, for some, had unmistakable parallels with the Jews’ own historical experience; it also revealed an insecure community in the process of negotiating its identity in a transformed South African and Jewish world order. It is nonetheless notable that the community’s willingness to speak out beyond immediate Jewish concerns, however tentatively, came at the moment when it was perhaps most intimidated by Afrikaner nationalism and genuinely vulnerable to antisemitism. As the Nazi genocide was unfolding and in its aftermath, South African Jews repeatedly and explicitly framed their own battle against antisemitism in the context of a wider democratic, anti-racist struggle both abroad and at home. That such connections became increasingly less evident in the later decades of apartheid, with Jews gradually insisting on the uniqueness of their victimhood despite a comfortable white existence and stable relationship with the ruling party, is an issue worthy of further discussion and research.
Notes 1 See Annie E. Coombes, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, N.C., 2003), 83–95. 2 Claudia Bathsheba Braude, ed., Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa: An Anthology (Cape Town, 2001); Milton Shain, “South Africa,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman (Baltimore, Md., 1996), 670–89; Milton Shain and Andrew Lamprecht, “A Past That Must Not Go Away: Holocaust Denial in South Africa,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, ed. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, vol. 1 (New York, 2001), 858–69. 3 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999); Deborah E. Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust, 1950–1965,”
[57] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[58] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Modern Judaism 16, no. 3 (1996): 195–214; Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge, Engl., 2005). 4 Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York, 2009); Dalia Ofer, “The Past That Does Not Pass: Israelis and Holocaust Memory,” Israeli Studies 14, no. 1 (2009): 1–35; Doron Bar, “Holocaust Commemoration in Israel During the 1950s: The Holocaust Cellar on Mount Zion,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 12, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 16–38; Lawrence Baron, “The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 62–88. 5 Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg, 2007), 397. Further sources relating to anti-apartheid activists’ use of the Nazism analogy before 1960 are discussed in the text below. References to Nazism were frequently made by activists in South Africa and in exile as well as by international solidarity movements between 1960 and 1994; see, e.g., Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davis Jr., eds., Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress: The Struggle Against Apartheid, 1948–1990 (Oxford, 1991), 248, 265–66, 311. 6 For the most important account to date of Jewish responses to apartheid, see Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover, N.H., 2003). For an overview of some key challenges facing South African Jewry in the immediate postwar period, see Gustav Saron, The Revolution in Jewish Life: An Address at the 17th Biennial Congress of the S.A. Jewish Board of Deputies (Johannesburg, 1949). 7 See, e.g., Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, eds., Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance (Cape Town, 1996), and Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (London, 2003). 8 Brian Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich (Middlesex, 1964); Sipo E. Mzimela, Apartheid: South African Naziism, 1st ed. (Nairobi, 1983). 9 Hermann Giliomee, “The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929–1948,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 2 (2003): 373–92; Heribert Adam, “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Black Racism: Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa,” in The Holocaust’s Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education, ed. F. C. DeCoste and Bernard Schwartz (Edmonton, 2000), 244–59. 10 Lionel Abrahams, The Democratic Chorus and Individual Choice, Alfred and Winifred Hoernlé Memorial Lecture 37th (Johannesburg, 1996). 11 Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth. For a more extensive literature review, see the preface to Patrick J. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Middletown, Conn., 1991). 12 Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika, 20. 13 Ibid., 16, 83, 138–43, 161–62; Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 11– 16; Christoph Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel: Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag (Pretoria, 2008); Report of the Executive
Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, August 1947 to May 1949 (Johannesburg, 1949), 21. 14 Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika, 61–69. 15 Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg, 2008), 106–11. 16 Shain, “South Africa,” 675–76. 17 Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika, 77–82; Michael A. Green, “South African Jewish Responses to the Holocaust, 1941–1948” (master’s thesis, University of South Africa, 1987), 181–83. 18 Milton Shain, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), chap. 7. Antisemitism abated almost immediately after the new government took office in 1948, as I discuss further in the text below. 19 “Introducing Ourselves” (editorial), Jewish Affairs 1, no. 1 (1941): 1. 20 “Current Comment” (editorial), Jewish Affairs 4, no. 2 (1944): 1–2. 21 Gustav Saron, “The Fight Against Anti-Semitism: II: The Situation in South Africa,” Jewish Affairs 1, no. 3 (1941): 3; Gustav Saron and Louis Hotz, eds., The Jews in South Africa: A History (Cape Town, 1955), 382– 83; Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, June 1949 to May 1951 (Johannesburg, 1951); Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, August 1947 to May 1949; Morris Kentridge, I Recall (Johannesburg, 1959), 269–70, 304–5. 22 Dozens of articles in the Jewish press from the early 1940s addressed these issues. See, e.g., Green, “South African Jewish Responses to the Holocaust,” 37–38, 42. 23 A United War Appeal had existed before this time; on the launching of this distinct initiative, see “The War Appeal Conference” (editorial), Jewish Affairs 1, no. 10 (1942): 1. 24 Green, “South African Jewish Responses to the Holocaust,” 66–68, 82–87. 25 “Day of Mourning: A Call to Every Jew,” Dec. 29, 1942, South African Jewish Board of Deputies Rochlin Archives (hereafter Rochlin Archives), 150.2A. 26 “S.A. Jewry in Mourning,” The South African Leader, Feb. 1943; “Calling Jewry to Action,” Jewish Affairs 3, no. 8 (1944): 3. 27 Thomas Karis, ed., From Protest to Challenge. Vol. 2: Hope and Challenge (Stanford, 1973), 351. 28 Ibid., 358. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Surendra Bhana and Bridglal Pachai, eds., A Documentary History of Indian South Africans (Cape Town, 1984), 189–207. 32 Ibid., 180, 183. 33 Dr. Y. M. Dadoo and G. M. Naicker, Facts About the Ghetto Act and a Historical Synopsis of the Indian Question in South Africa (Durban, 1993), 10. 34 Nelson Mandela, “Bantu Education Goes to University,” Liberation, June 1957.
[59] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[60] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
35 See, e.g., “Are Nats Nazis?,” The Black Sash 1, no. 7 (July 1956): 1, and “Judgment on Herrenvolk,” Fighting Talk 16, no. 2 (Mar. 1962): 11. 36 Nelson Mandela, “People Are Destroyed,” Liberation, Oct. 1955. 37 Numerous young South African Jews were drawn to left-wing politics in the 1930s and 1940s in the form of anti-fascist resistance; descriptions of scuffles on the Johannesburg City Hall steps are legion (though these activities earned the censure of the SAJBD). See Mark Israel and Simon Adams, “‘That Spells Trouble’: Jews and the Communist Party of South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 145–62; Taffy Adler, “Lithuania’s Diaspora: The Johannesburg Jewish Workers’ Club, 1928–1948,” Journal of Southern African Studies 6, no. 1 (1979): 70–92; and Immanuel Suttner, ed., Cutting Through the Mountain: Interviews with South African Jewish Activists (Johannesburg, 1997), 302. 38 For a particularly rich and nuanced account, see James T. Campbell, “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Immigration and the South African Left,” in Memories, Realities, and Dreams: Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience, ed. Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn (Johannesburg, 2000), 96–162; Shimoni, Community and Conscience; and Suttner, Cutting Through the Mountain. 39 Ronald Segal, Into Exile (London, 1963), 34, 308. See also Ronald Segal and Dan Jacobson, “Apartheid and South African Jewry: An Exchange,” Commentary 24, no. 5 (Nov. 1957): 424–31. 40 Franz Auerbach, “Our Responsibility,” Etz Chayim News 2, no. 6 (Sept. 1960): 34. Auerbach’s lifelong opposition to apartheid, which he frequently linked to Nazism in his many writings and public addresses, is a subject for another article. See University of the Witwatersrand Historical Papers, Dr. Franz Auerbach collection, 1950–2006 (Collection number A3267), and Franz Auerbach, No Single Loyalty. Many Strands One Design: A South African Teacher’s Life (Münster, 2002). 41 By “mainstream” I refer broadly to institutions and individuals identified with the Jewish community, including the SAJBD, religious leaders, and the Jewish press. 42 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 6. 43 See, e.g., the memoirs of Jewish Labour parliamentarian Morris Kent ridge, I Recall. For an honest account of the paradoxes of white liberalism, see also Dan Jacobson, “A White Liberal Trapped By His Prejudices,” Commentary 15, no. 5 (1953): 454–59. 44 See, e.g., “Editorial,” Jewish Affairs 1, no. 8 (Jan. 1942): 1; “Jewry’s Pledge,” Jewish Affairs 3, no. 8 (Jan. 1944): 2; and Israel Abrahams, Living Waters (Cape Town, 1968), 381–85. 45 “Freedom Admits No Compromise,” Jewish Affairs 1, no. 2 (July 1941): 2. 46 Gerald Lazarus, “The Road Before Us,” Jewish Affairs 1, no. 4 (Sept. 1941): 1–2. 47 “South Africa Must Choose” (editorial) Jewish Affairs 2, no. 11 (Apr. 1943): 2. 48 Ibid.
49 “Positive Principles of Our Fight,” Jewish Affairs 3, no. 10 (Mar. 1944): 11. See also, among many other examples, “Antisemitism in South African Politics,” Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (July 1942): 8; “The Board’s Public Relations Work: Keen Debate at Monthly Meeting of Deputies,” Jewish Affairs 1, no. 3 (Aug. 1941): 6; and “Congress Marks New Sense of Solidarity,” Jewish Affairs 2, no. 3 (Aug. 1942): 4. 50 See, e.g., [anonymous], “The Battle for South Africa,” Jewish Affairs 1, no. 1 (June 1946): 18, and “Editorial,” Jewish Affairs 6, no. 9 (Sept. 1951): 2. 51 Gustav Saron, “Principles of Our Fight,” Jewish Affairs 3, no. 11 (Apr. 1944): 7–8. 52 “Racial Intolerance” (editorial), Jewish Affairs 4, no. 6 (Nov. 1944): 2. 53 “Editorial,” Jewish Affairs 5, no. 1 (June 1945): 1–2. 54 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 43. 55 Ibid., 16–17. 56 At that time, sectors of the mainstream Jewish community also engaged in a range of welfare activities directed at non-whites; ibid., 33– 34, 38. A study of South African Jewish students reported that they were likely to be more tolerant of “non-Europeans” than other whites because of the Jewish historical experience of oppression. See Simon N. Herman, The Reaction of Jews to Anti-Semitism: A Social Psychological Study Based Upon the Attitudes of a Group of South African Jewish Students, Etc. (Johannesburg, 1945), 46–50. 57 See the discussion of SAJBD meetings in Green, “South African Jewish Responses to the Holocaust,” 178–80, 187–88. 58 Dr. H. Sonnabend, “Let Us Not Remain Passive,” Jewish Affairs 2, no. 8 (Aug. 1947): 59. 59 [Anonymous], “My Vote on Election Day,” Jewish Affairs 2, no. 6 (June 1947): 9–10. 60 Ibid. 61 Benjamin Pogrund, War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist (New York, 2000), 31. 62 S. M. Kuper, South African Jewry Today: Opening Address at the 17th Biennial Congress of the S.A. Jewish Board of Deputies, May 1949 (Johannesburg, 1949), 8–10; Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, August 1947 to May 1949. 63 Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, August 1947 to May 1949, 20–21, 23; Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, June 1949 to May 1951, 13–14. 64 Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, June 1951 to May 1953 (Johannesburg, 1953), 11. 65 “Editorial,” Jewish Affairs 6, no. 2 (Feb. 1951): 2. 66 Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 322. 67 The following discussion in the text cites rabbis Solomon Rappaport, Louis Rabinowitz, and André Ungar where they make explicit reference to the Holocaust. For further discussion of rabbinic responses to
[61] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[62] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
apartheid, see Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 36–46, and Claudia Braude, “From the Brotherhood of Man to the World to Come: The Denial of the Political in Rabbinic Writing Under Apartheid,” in Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Milton Shain (Urbana, Ill., 1999), 259–89. 68 Glenda Abramson, “Prof. S. Rappaport: A Portrait,” Jewish Affairs (Dec. 1973): 29–32; Hadassah Sacks, “Obituary,” Jewish Affairs (Jan. 1986): 33; Sonia Grober, “Solomon Rappaport: Present and Past,” in Essays in Honour of Salo Rappaport: On the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Glenda Abramson (Johannesburg, 1985), iv–x. 69 Solomon Rappaport, Rabbinic Thoughts on Race (Johannesburg, 1951), 40. See also Rabbi Dr. Solomon Rappaport, Jewish Horizons: Aspects of Jewish Life and Thought (Johannesburg, 1959), 240–41, 244–46; Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 43–44; and my interview with Rabbi Charles Wallach, Mar. 16, 2010. 70 Louis Isaac Rabinowitz, “Jews and Academic Segregation,” Students’ News Bulletin 1, no. 3 (1954): 4–5. See also “We Oppose Academic Segregation,” Students’ News Bulletin 1, no. 2 (Mar. 1954): 1. 71 “Rabbi Ungar Ordered to Leave Union,” S. A. Jewish Times, Dec. 14, 1956. 72 Rabbi Dr. André Ungar, “The Abdication of a Community,” Africa South 3, no. 2 (1959): 34. 73 Rochlin Archives, Biographical File Ungar: Memo from Mr. Rich, Dec. 13, 1956; Memo from Mr. Rich, Jan. 4, 1957; “Antwoord op brief van Rabbi,” Jan. 22, 1959. 74 Solly Yellin, “Why Should Jews Speak Alike in Politics?,” Evening Post, Dec. 29, 1956. 75 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 36–38. 76 Pessa Weinberg, “The Unwarranted Attack on Rabbi A. Ungar,” S. A. Jewish Times, July 5, 1957. See also Adam Mendelsohn, “Two Far South: Rabbinical Responses to Apartheid and Segregation in South Africa and the American South,” Southern Jewish History 6 (2003). 77 See also the account of Jewish senator Leslie Rubin, “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Jews,” Africa South 1, no. 3 (1957): 28–34. 78 “Editorial,” Jewish Affairs 6, no. 9 (Sept. 1951): 2. 79 Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, June 1949 to May 1951, 15. 80 Gustav Saron, “The Jewish Citizen and the SA Political Scene,” Jewish Affairs 6, no. 10 (Oct. 1951): 51. 81 Henry Katzew, Solution for South Africa: A Jewish View (Cape Town, 1955), 53. 82 Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika, 4. 83 Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, “Constructing a Usable Past: History, Memory, and South African Jewry in an Age of Anxiety,” in Place and Displacement in Jewish History and Memory: Zakor v’Makor, ed. David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, and Milton Shain (London, 2009), 48; Shain, Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa, 1.
84 Mendelsohn and Shain, “Constructing a Usable Past,” 46–47; Saron and Hotz, Jews in South Africa, 399–400. 85 Saron and Hotz, Jews in South Africa, 382–85. See also John Simon, “Towards an Appraisal of South African Jewish Historiography,” in Festschrift in Honour of Frank R. Bradlow, ed. Pieter E. Westra and Brian Warner (Cape Town, 1993), 19–30. 86 Israel Abrahams, Living Waters, 15–16, 24, 36–37, 51, 96, 133, 212–13. 87 Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, April 1958 to August 1960 (Johannesburg, 1960), 33. 88 SAJBD Day of Mourning Sub-Committee minutes of meetings (various), Rochlin Archives, Arch 211, File 3 (World Jewish Day of Mourning); Report of the Executive Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, September 1960 to August 1962 (Johannesburg, 1962), 23. 89 Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 33. 90 Rochlin Archives, Arch 211, File 4 (Johannesburg Communal Monument West Park Cemetery); “Appeal to South African Jewry,” n.d., Rochlin Archives, 150.2A; invitation to laying of the foundation stone for West Park Monument, S. A. Jewish Times, Aug. 29, 1958; “Monument to Jewry’s Martyrs in Europe,” Zionist Record, Sept. 5, 1958; “Thousands Weep as Monument to Martyred Jewry Is Dedicated in Johannesburg,” S. A. Jewish Times, May 15, 1959; Leon Feldberg, ed., The South African Jewish Year Book 1959–60 (Johannesburg, 1960), 78. 91 Quoted in “Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Recalled,” S. A. Jewish Times, May 6, 1949. 92 For similar examples, see Rochlin Archives, 211–2, Files 1 and 2; “Johannesburg Remembers Warsaw Ghetto Heroes,” S. A. Jewish Times, Apr. 28, 1950; “Impressive Day of Mourning Demonstration in Johannesburg,” S. A. Jewish Times, Apr. 17, 1953. 93 Mendelsohn and Shain, Jews in South Africa, 190–91. 94 Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn, “South African Zionism and Jewish Identity,” in Israel, the Diaspora, and Jewish Identity, ed. Danny Ben-Moshe and Zohar Segev (Brighton, 2007), 279–85; Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 4–5, 23–26. 95 “Memorial Day for Jewish Martyrs and Fighters,” South African Jewish Chronicle, Apr. 25, 1952. 96 “Thousands Weep as Monument to Martyred Jewry Is Dedicated in Johannesburg,” S. A. Jewish Times, May 15, 1959. 97 Green, “South African Jewish Responses to the Holocaust, 1941–1948,” 60. 98 “Memorial Day for Jewish Martyrs and Fighters,” South African Jewish Chronicle, Apr. 25, 1952; “Zionist Youth Remember Warsaw Ghetto,” Zionist Record, May 1, 1953. 99 “Impressive Day of Mourning Demonstration in Johannesburg,” S. A. Jewish Times, Apr. 17, 1953. 100 “Johannesburg Remembers Warsaw Ghetto Heroes,” S. A. Jewish Times, Apr. 28, 1950.
[63] The Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa
•
Shirli Gilbert
[64] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
101 “Deep Mood at Day of Mourning Meetings,” Zionist Record, Apr. 21, 1961; “Remembrance Service at King David School,” S. A. Jewish Times, Apr. 29, 1960. 102 On 1967, see Milton Shain, “Consolidating the Consolidated: The Impact of the Six-Day War on South African Jewry,” in The Six-Day War and World Jewry, ed. Eli Lederhendler (Bethesda, Md., 2000), 205–16. 103 Braude, Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa, xii. 104 Braude, “From the Brotherhood of Man to the World to Come,” 279–80. 105 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006). 106 Saron and Hotz, Jews in South Africa, 398. 107 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 29; David Sherman, “My Encounter with Apartheid: A Reform Rabbi’s Viewpoint,” Jewish Affairs 52, no. 1 (1997): 74. 108 Braude, Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa, l. 109 On Jewish economic success in this period, see Edwin Stanton Munger, ed., African Field Reports, 1952–1961 (Cape Town, 1961), 500–501; Rubin, “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Jews”; and Daniel Mackintosh, “Speaking Out Against Injustice? Re-examining the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ Response to Apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s” (Kaplan Centre, University of Cape Town, June 17, 2009). 110 For an illuminating discussion in a different context, see Neil Gregor, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (New Haven, Conn., 2008).
Pogrom and Avant-Garde: Peretz Markish’s Di kupe Roy Greenwald A bstr act Through a close reading of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe (The Mound), this article suggests that the avant-garde is less a movement directed at a determined future than one that escapes an impossible past. One of the major works of the Yiddish avant-garde poetry, Di kupe reflects a materialist vision of history, repudiating thereby an age-old Jewish tradition, its martyrology, and its concept of history. Di kupe, I argue, highlights the avant-garde as a subversive gesture that not only repudiates the past but also flouts any order as such. The article traces the ways by which the cubo-futuristic and constructivist aesthetics of the poem reflect Markish’s materialist vision. Key words: Yiddish literature, Peretz Markish, Di kupe, avant-garde
T
he French term avant-garde designates those troops advancing before the main camp, paving their way forward. Yet the term could also be understood to describe less the action of forging ahead of the camp than that of escaping from it. In this sense, the avant-garde might depict the movement of setting forth from a past in which it has no place to an uncertain and unknowable future. Only in retrospect does the avant-garde movement appear to be part of a coherent historical continuum. If we apply this meaning of avantgarde to literature, the term could be understood both as an expression of purposeful action and as the written trace of that which escapes its past. These are the two faces of the avant-garde: the one as seen from the past it left behind, the other as seen from the vantage of its own future. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger has stressed the openness of the avant-gardist work of art.1 The open and, as Bürger terms it, “nonorganic” form of the avant-gardist work of art implies that the Roy Greenwald, “Pogrom and Avant-Garde: Peretz Markish’s Di kupe,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 16, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2010): 65–84
[66] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
work is not fully conceptualized, much less predetermined, before its production. Thus, by its very openness, the work of art reflects the avant-gardist movement toward an undetermined future. It is this movement, I would argue, that characterizes the works and lives of the members of the Yiddish avant-garde in Eastern Europe. Its members entered adulthood at a time of great upheaval: many of them were thrown into the trenches of World War I and witnessed the October Revolution and civil war that came in its aftermath. Moreover, members of the Yiddish avant-garde, unlike their non-Jewish counterparts, were particularly affected, whether directly or indirectly, by hundreds of pogroms perpetrated during the civil war years in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed in a wave of violence unparalleled in magnitude since the Chmelnitzki pogroms of the seventeenth century. The rise of the Yiddish avant-garde in Eastern Europe is therefore impossible to dissociate from the extreme v iolence by which it was generated. And yet its poetry was directed not so much against the perpetrators as against an age-old Jewish tradition—its martyrology and the theological comfort it sought to offer to the faithful. This is the tenor of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe (The Mound). One of the major works of the Yiddish avant-garde in Eastern Europe, Di kupe was published in Warsaw in 19212 and refers to a pogrom that took place in the town of Horoditch in September 1920. According to testimony given by two survivors, the perpetrators of the violence entered the town, assembled the Jews at a public square in front of the theater, and shot them. As the victims fell one on top of the other, their bodies formed a pile that still stood untouched two days later on Yom Kippur.3 Markish was not an eyewitness to the massacre but chose to focus on this event for its symbolic date. A reading of Markish’s poem after World War II might be inclined to situate Di kupe not only against the atrocities committed during the revolutionary time in which it was written but also against the devastation that came later. Such a reading would almost inevitably place Di kupe within a Jewish martyrological corpus that begins with the Bible and extends to the literature written after the Holocaust, and it would be disposed to underscore the continuity in Jewish literature of catastrophe over and against discontinuity and rupture. Yet it is this very continuity that Markish’s poem disavows. Indeed, as I demonstrate in what follows, Di kupe offers a decisive repudiation of traditional Jewish martyrology.
* * * Towering above the Hebrew and Yiddish poetic scene at the time that Markish began writing poetry was the figure of Hayim Nahman Bialik. In particular, Bialik’s poem on the Kishinev pogrom, “Be-‘ir haharegah” (In the City of Slaughter; 1903), had set a commanding example of poetic representation of the pogrom. Any subsequent such representations were therefore bound to be a daunting challenge. An insight into the poetic unease that attended Markish as he wrote Di kupe can be gleaned from the recollections of the Soviet Yiddish critic Nokhem Oyslender, who recalls the time that Markish brought him sections from the poem to read. In one such meeting, Oyslender asked Markish if he had ever thought of visiting Horoditch, the site of the pogrom, before composing his poem. Markish, Oyslender notes, answered in the negative, declaring, “What for? I see the mound from here.” To which Oyslender responded, “Yes, you see the mound from here, but you might see more from there.”4 In proposing that Markish travel to Horoditch, Oyslender was urging his friend to follow Bialik’s example. Bialik had been sent to Kishinev in 1903 on behalf of a historical committee in order to collect evidence from the survivors and to write a report on the pogrom; this had led him to write “Be-‘ir ha-haregah.”5 By dismissing his friend’s proposal, Markish refused to follow the example of Bialik, and, indeed, Markish’s disapproving (if also reverent) attitude toward Bialik resonates throughout Oyslender’s account. Oyslender qualifies Markish’s poetry as “anti-Bialik” and includes a telling anecdote about Markish’s conflict with the commanding figure of Jewish poetry at the time. Recalling the occasion on which he gave Markish a copy of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Oblako v shtanakh” (The Cloud in Trousers; 1914–15), Oyslender describes Markish’s turning to him and exclaiming: “If I had enough money, I would have bought a train ticket to Odessa and visited Bialik, given him this book, and said: ‘Here, genius. Take this book and enjoy it.’” Oyslender seems to interpret this as a kind of oedipal plot in which Markish, upon reading “Oblako v shtanakh,” recognized in Mayakovsky a poetic brother capable of freeing him from the authority of Bialik, the father. Oyslender relates this episode in order to provide us with a key to appreciating the profound difference between the “pogrom poems” of the two poets: a difference that marks the leap that Markish, along with his fellow members of the Yiddish avant-garde, took away from the poetry of Bialik.6 This difference can be seen in the way Bialik and Markish represent the heavens (in both senses of the word: sky as a perceptible phe-
[67] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[68] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
nomenon, and providence as an abstract concept) above the site of the pogrom. Bialik’s earlier poem “Al ha-shechitah” (On the Slaughter; 1903)—which, like “Be-‘ir ha-haregah,” was written in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom but months earlier than the more famous poem of Bialik’s—opens with the following lines: Heaven, beg mercy for me! If there is a God in you, and an orbit through you to this God Which I have not discovered— Then pray for me!7
Bialik’s relationship to God here is strikingly ambiguous. If the speaker addresses heaven, why does he question the presence of God? And if there is a God in heaven, how dare he question God’s presence? Bialik’s poem conjures up a heaven that is both a perceptible phenomenon (sky) and an abstract one (providence). Whereas Bialik’s heaven could, simultaneously, symbolize and not symbolize divine providence, Markish’s heaven is devoid of any divine presence. The most striking expression of this negation of divinity can be inferred from the opening sonnet of Di kupe: After you, the killed of the Ukraine; After you, butchered In a mound in Horoditch, The Dnieper town… —Kaddish
No! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards, Out of my mouth’s brown streams of pitch Sob a brown leaven of blood and sawdust. No. Don’t touch the vomit on the earth’s black thigh. Away. I stink. Frogs crawl on me. Looking for mother-father here? Seeking a friend? They’re here. They’re here, but taint the air with stink. Away. Awkwardly they delouse themselves with hands like warped brass. From top to bottom, a mound of filthy wash. Claw, crazed wind. Take what you want; take it. Before you, the church sits like a polecat beside a heap of Strangled fowl. Oh! Tallow skies! Enjoy your Sabbath shirts! And wear them in good health, in pleasure, you all, you all. 11 Tishrei 5681.8
In this opening sonnet, which with some variation also closes Di kupe, heaven can no longer be perceived as a symbolic site of divine
providence. Heaven is represented merely as tallow—that is, the fatty substance of the animal, which is its lesser part and is, among other things, prohibited for eating by the halakhah. If heaven is traditionally figured in transcendental terms, here it is materialized to the point of being emptied of any metaphysical meaning. The tallow is not only the matter of heaven but also the material that fuels the fire. Put differently, heaven as a symbol of providence here is not so much opposed to history but is itself part of history. Hence the fire consuming the victims’ bodies also consumes every kind of transcendence while earth and heaven collapse into a single material figure. The dismantlement of the binary opposition between earth and heaven—that is, between the materiality of history and transcendence— is evinced also in the figuration of the heavens as an animal straying around the mound of corpses and licking them (“No! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards”), as if heaven had become a link in the food chain of the historical event. Indeed, this same ecological prin ciple explains the interpellation to the wind—which might also stand for some kind of metaphysical entity—to descend and loot the leftovers (“Claw, crazed wind. Take what you want; take it”). This is blasphemy, of course, and not merely in the defiance against a monotheistic deity— which we can find also in Bialik—but also, and perhaps more provocatively, in the very materialization of God. * * * In an article titled “Mit farmakhte oygn” (With Closed Eyes) and published in Bikher velt in Warsaw in 1922, Markish situates the enthusiasm with which the Yiddish avant-garde embraced materialistic representation within the context of Jewish religious tradition. Describing the Jewish avant-garde as breaking the Second Commandment—the prohibition to make an image—Markish writes: In Jewish literature, the Word always appeared in its abstract meaning. Except for some chapters in the books of the prophets and a few other places in the Bible, we have a literature of va-Yoymer, va-Yedaber [“And God said,” “And God spoke”]. The image was foreign to the Jewish tongue. . . . It is important to emphasize that already in ancient times the ability among Jews to materialize an abstract idea in the form of an image became atrophied. If we remember the prohibition “Thou shalt not make yourself an image,” we will understand why the image has remained so alien to Jewish art, why the longing for the image has been so tragic, and why a people that has given to the entire world the abstract
[69] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[70] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
god suddenly created, in a rash of religious ecstasy, the golden calf and worshipped it. And indeed why the Imaginist movement, which essentially consists of an image, found expression in Yiddish poetry.9
According to Markish, the passion for the material image had been repressed following its eruption in the story of the golden calf, and it did not become visible again—at least not in Jewish culture—until Yiddish modernist poetry gave it form. Yet for Markish and other members of the Yiddish avant-garde, this act of creation must also be understood as a repudiation of the monotheistic law. In fact, the very repudiation of the law enabled the eruption of art.10 The point is strikingly made in a sequence of Di kupe where the pile of bodies is depicted “spitting back” the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai: Ah, Mount Sinai! In the upturned bowl of sky—Lick blue mud Humbly, humbly as a cat licks up its midnight prayers Into your face, the Sovereign Mound spits back the Ten Commandments.11
Here the act of spitting back all Ten Commandments, including the second one, at Mount Sinai signifies the liberation from moral obligations. Nihilism thus becomes the necessary condition for the creation of art. In his yearning for representation, Markish envies the opulence of Russian Orthodox religious art: The Russian national style—the church—which founds its highest expression in the [Russian] imaginists, has always been for artists of all times the everlasting source for creative emotions and excitement, beginning with ordinary church ornaments and ending with the image of festive religious liturgy. And whence do Russian poets take the form for their great and awful experiences if not from the church? For it was in the church that Russian primitive folk art was created, and it was in the church that the Russian people saw an image, the form of their God.12
This appreciative depiction of the Russian church is striking, given that a year earlier Markish had described the church as a polecat slouching in front of the mound of Jewish corpses. Markish’s relation to the Christian world was one of ambivalence. Indeed, the relation between Jews and Christians in Eastern Europe could be described as perverted intimacy and might explain the way Markish and his fellow members of the Yiddish avant-garde often represented the church
and its rituals: not just as a place in which anti-Judaism was promulgated but also as a constant source of appealing, if illicit, physicality. * * * The blasphemous element in Markish’s aesthetics, though anti-martyrological, should not be construed as anti-religious, let alone secular. If anything, Markish’s blasphemic aesthetics could be read as ritualistic gesticulation, perhaps even articulation. His poetic movement is one in which the repudiation of abstract representation tends toward the ritualization of the material. Indeed, Markish’s Di kupe may strike the reader as paradoxical: on the one hand, the poem shuns Jewish tradition and liturgy; on the other, the poem is defined in its epigraph as a kaddish—a prayer of mourning, that is, in praise of God. Moreover, the poem contains numerous quotations from Jewish prayer, especially from the Yom Kippur service.13 Markish keeps quoting texts from the very corpus that he also repudiates. Marxist critics did not find any apparent paradox in this. “Neither Markish nor his readers believe in God anymore,” argued Itskhok Nusinov. “For this reason, God was never more than a spectacle.”14 And Dov Ber Malkin affirmed: “It was natural and understandable that, in the wake of the calamity that had befallen his time, Markish did not seek consolation in heaven, which the tip of the mound had pierced.”15 Yet the presence of liturgical references in the poem cannot be dismissed as if they were merely intended for ironic effect. In fact, Markish himself addressed theological questions with considerable gravity. Thus, for instance, readers of the Literarishe bleter in September 1924 would have seen a notice announcing a public lecture by Markish on, among other issues, “blasphemy as the quest for God.” And the language of this notice was significant, for the transition from religious search to blasphemy is a theme that Markish takes up in the third sequence of Di kupe: Sunk to his loins in silence, the town sits Like an upturned empty wagon in a marsh. Ah, if only one would come To say something. Ah, grief and woe. The sunset, like a weeping hawk Sits on the blind roof of an entreating palm. Ah, almightiest of the world,
[71] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[72] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Open—open your starry title page. Hineni, he‘oni. Unworthy, here I stand. I yearn to merge with you in prayer And yet my heart, my lips are moved Only to blasphemies and curses. Ah, my prayer-exhausted, Tenfold desecrated hands turn. Take them, take them. Caress them, lick them, as a dog Licks its scabby, suppurating hide. I pledge them to you. I’ve built you a new ark In the middle of the marketplace A black mound, like a blotch. Seat yourself upon its buxom roof Like an old raven on a dungheap. Take my heart, my prayer-exhausted heart, And all such leftovers. Take it And peck, peck what the chariot of twenty generations brought. I pledge it to you.16
The quest that someone “would come / To say something” might call to mind the verbal ritual of invoking prayers and dirges in order to infuse meaning into calamity and to revalidate the bond between God and His people at a time of trial.17 Indeed, the speaker answers his own quest by later posing as a cantor, which can be deduced from the Hebrew words “Hineni he‘oni” (“Unworthy, here I stand”)—the words opening the prayer traditionally recited by the emissary of the congregation who pleads to God to accept his imminent prayers. This religious practice, however, results in blasphemy: “And yet my heart, my lips are moved / Only to blasphemies and curses.” In this synagogal scene, that is, the cantor’s wish “to merge with you in prayer” turns out to be a stream of cursing. Can such a stream of blasphemy be termed a prayer at all? Beyond the poignant irony underlying the depiction of the hands of the dead stiffening in the moment of their extreme agony as praying hands, the poem begs us to ask how to read this gesture of devotion against the blasphemous words of the speaker. After all, these words might well undermine the very gesture of the dead bodies. Yet a certain difficulty persists. It is not at all clear how to define this moment in which gestures of piety and devotion are intermingled with words of blasphemy. Is it a religious moment or
a secular one? The very question calls to mind the notice published in Literarishe bleter by which blasphemy was construed as a way of seeking God. Markish’s poem thus undermines the oppositional relations between religiosity and secularity. The two concepts are no longer mutually exclusive possibilities—as they are within any system of orthodoxy (be it rabbinical orthodoxy or, mutatis mutandis, a Marxist one)—but rather the extreme impossibilities between which the modern subject is doomed to exist. As Franz Rosenzweig has put it, Modern man is neither a believer nor an unbeliever. He believes and he doubts. And so he is nothing, but he is alive. Belief and unbelief “happen” to him and all that he is required to do is not run away from what is happening but make use of it once it has happened.18
This shuttling between heresy and faith is well presented in the way that this synagogal scene is displayed. In the beginning of the sequence cited above, God is addressed in the traditional manner by way of words taken from Jewish liturgy; later, the divine being is represented as a dog (“Caress them, lick them, as a dog / Licks its scabby, suppurating hide”). Thus, within a few lines, the monotheistic deity is subjected to a materialistic realization and is reduced to a mere animal—a hungry mammal that takes its place within the ecological system. * * * These apparent oppositions need not necessarily be reconciled. Rather than trying to affix a single meaning to the words of the speaker, as critics of various schools have done, we might look at the ritual depicted in Markish’s poem as mere performance—that is, as a heterogeneous cluster of signs (like speech and gesture) that cannot be subjected to one ineluctable meaning. Reading Markish’s ritual as performance might illuminate the tension between the gestures and the words that the body produces. The ritualistic form is what remains when the religious intention in its strict orthodox sense is no longer present at the very place where, as in Markish’s poem, gestures are still being made and prayers are still being recited. One of the distinctive features of Di kupe is the presence of several types of discourse—that of the speaker and, within it, remnants of liturgical texts (opvarfekhtsn, or “leftovers,” in the poem’s language)— lifted from Jewish prayer. The effect of these concomitant discourses
[73] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[74] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
is a dissonance that is difficult to resolve. One example of such dissonance appears in the last stanza of the fourth sequence, where the blasphemous tirade against heaven is followed by a blessing from the Jewish morning service:19 Already rears the head like a middle finger from Bethlehem And pierces the heavens And peels it bare, Borekh she-omar ve-hoyo ho-‘oylem! [Blessed be He who spoke, and the world came into being!]20
The paratactic structure of these lines places the Yiddish words of the present speaker next to a Hebrew citation from past tradition, with only a comma separating the two discourses. It is a lot to ask from a comma, and yet the absence of any more meaningful linguistic signs capable of negotiating the relation between such competing discourses is not specific to these lines alone. It is pervasive in Di kupe. The clustering of different discourses, in fact, betrays an artistic intention that exceeds any syntactical style. It serves as a deliberate poetic device that is critical to Markish’s poetics and could best be understood as verbal collage. A succinct description of how collage might operate in literature was provided by the 1978 Group Mu manifesto: Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition.21
Indeed, the linearity of the discourse in Di kupe is interrupted by citations from Jewish liturgy that are themselves part of the poem’s collage, because the act of citing, in this context, means both quoting and summoning before a court. The speaker is not merely quoting these verses but also summoning them just after Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, to bear witness to a past that has expired or to face his own blasphemous accusation. The collage accords an equal status to multiple discourses in that they all emanate from the same speaker. This is true in Di kupe and for the poet himself, who, like his entire generation of young Jews, stood at the crossroads of two periods in twentieth-century Jewish history. They were the bearers of two discourses: that of Jewish liturgy, which they repeated over and again in their youth (and it is note
worthy that, as a child, Markish was a member of a synagogal choir in Berditchev), and that of the revolutionary avant-garde. Di kupe captures the collision of these discourses—a collision that can be biographically situated within the few years when Markish and his Jewish peers found themselves mobilized and thrown into the trenches of World War I and when, moreover, many of them were overtaken by the liberating ideas of the revolution. Yet the displacement of liturgical citations onto a new discourse— one that is fundamentally alien to their original context—poses an interpretive problem. One possible way to answer it might be found in Bürger’s analysis of avant-garde art and one of its most identifiable techniques: the montage as the creative act that results, among other products, in the collage. As he explains, this compositional principle undermining the organic wholeness of the work of art is connected to its avant-gardist character: The avant-gardist work of art is defined as nonorganic. Whereas in the organic work of art, the structural principle governs the parts and joins them in a unified whole, in the avant-gardist work, the parts have a significantly larger autonomy vis-à-vis the whole. They become less important as constituent elements of a totality of meaning and simultaneously more important as relatively autonomous signs.22
According to Bürger, avant-garde art is nonorganic because its material is devoid of any “living” meaning. Having been dissociated from the context that gives it meaning, the material becomes lifeless. Viewed in this light, the citations from the liturgy as well as the ritual gestures in the poem appear to be remnants of a lost world; they are severed from their literary context and transposed into a foreign verbal landscape. The integrity of meaning in Di kupe ceases to exist once the work loses its organic wholeness. In this sense, the liturgical citations and ritual gestures in the poem might be said to be the textual mirror image of the mound of limbs on the marketplace of Horoditch. In his book Farbaygeyendik (Passing By), Markish describes Jewish tradition in its moment of breakdown and disintegration: What can we young people say on the graves of the last pillars on which the paralyzed spirit of an old culture reposes? Like chimneys that remained standing after the houses burned down . . . when the fire, the storm, has not yet quenched its thirst? Mixed with blood from the great devastation of the world—all those broken pieces have become dear to us—whether they came from our houses or not—and the ways leading to them are all covered with rubble.23
[75] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[76] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Much as he does in Di kupe, Markish expresses here ambivalence toward the tradition on whose grave he claims to be standing. This same ambivalence might explain Markish’s decision to define Di kupe in the epigraph as a kaddish, which he believed should be said not only over the slaughtered Jews of Horoditch but also over the tradition that was to give meaning to their lives and, even more so, to their deaths. Insofar as Di kupe, then, provides an answer to Markish’s question about what he and his generation should say on the graves of past cultures, it is a formal one at best: that of the collage. The collage reflects the historical period in which Di kupe was written: shortly after the October Revolution, during the civil war, at a time when the old order had collapsed and the new one had not yet fully come into being. * * * It is difficult to associate Markish with one specific stream in the Russian avant-garde because his poetry seems indebted to several of them. The intimacy between literature and the plastic arts was characteristic of a number of avant-garde movements. This was true of the Yiddish avant-garde, as exemplified by the Kultur Lige, whose books joined writers and artists in a union of text and illustration. This relationship between writers and artists was entirely reciprocal; since art illustrated literature, literature itself could be said to have illustrated art.24 In her study of the poetry of Anna Margolin, Barbara Mann has described the relationship between the visual and the verbal: Thematically and formally, visual poetics challenge the division between image and voice at the basis of Jewish culture’s understanding of itself and of its relation to other cultures. Treating visual motifs and the related themes of the body and the natural landscapes explicitly, visual poetics also attempted to close the material gap between image and voice—to make language, and literature, visible.25
In the case of Markish, it seems that the material gap between image and voice not only closes but fuses the two elements in a veritable communion. At such moments, Di kupe itself could be read as a representation of a work of the plastic arts. Among the many avant-garde groups that rapidly succeeded one another and changed their names at a dizzying rate were Russian cubo-futurism26 and constructivism. Russian cubo-futurism exerted considerable sway over Markish. Constituting an attack on the whole-
ness and integrality of the represented object, Russian cubo-futurism bears greatly on Di kupe. Indeed, nothing in the poem escapes dismemberment.27 The opening sonnet is a case in point. One of the most elaborate and distinct literary forms, the sonnet under Markish’s hand is subjected to extreme literary violence as if reflecting the violence suffered by pogrom victims themselves. Both Avraham Nowersztern and David Roskies have pointed out that the language of the sonnet resonates with the brutality of its images. Thus, the use of guttural and palatal consonants might be said to echo the sounds of dying bodies in the mound suffocating in their own vomit.28 In this sense, the opening and closing sonnets of Di kupe might be viewed as a cubo-futuristic transformation of its literary conventional form. And the cubistic dismemberment affects not only the formal aspects of the sonnet but also its figurative language. Thus, the description of the victims’ hands as “warped brass” is itself a cubo-futuristic composition. The depiction of what used to be a limb of a living body as twisted metal is a cubistic image whose sharp lines trace the mechanical indifference of a new kind of brutality, one that violates the contours of the human body. * * * It is no coincidence that the biblical image of Samson appears in the end of the second sequence of Di kupe in the composite figure of revolutionary and artist: Ah, you, my blind fathers, How many bloated wombs, How many debaucheries have borne me? Then why am I afraid to take A step into the ripped world? Hey, boundaries of the earth! Spread. The circle turns from Nile to Dnieper now. You, with spiked eyes, Leap, mound, wild fever, Over threshold, over ditches. Blind Samson, blinded hero, Hair’s sprouting on your head again. Leap upon a millstone; leap upon an arc; Make the distance tremble And topple all the world.29
[77] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[78] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
The figure of Samson depicts the artist liberated from the chains placed on him. His hair growing back and renewing his strength, Samson is able to shake the edifice and bring it down. As he does so, Samson as artist sets loose such geometric forms as a millstone and an arc from the demolished edifice. Yet the appearance of geometric forms in Markish’s poem should not be interpreted merely as cubistic analysis. When Markish wrote the poem, the constructivist movement, which had begun taking root in the mid-1910s and reached its height in the years following the October Revolution, was dominant among members of the avant-garde of Eastern Europe. In an article published in the Yiddish avant-garde review Ringen, the Jewish constructivist artist Henryk Berlewi—who was also the illustrator of the Warsaw edition of Di kupe—spelled out his view on the tasks of the artist: The form—as an element of expression—is deeply wronged and is restricted by the other elements of art. If we examine the form as such, we must try to peel off and liberate it from all other artistic elements and see it in its nakedness. If we succeed, we will have the key to the question of form. Then, if we see that which until now was melted within the art complex, the way between the idea and the form will not be disguised anymore by other elements, and we will already be able to deal only with the pure form. . . . We must therefore master the form—that is, to redeem it from side pressure. That we can do only when we regard it [the form] as a self-standing art factor, as the direct heir to the idea, independent from the content, that is, of that which this very form expresses by itself.30
According to Berlewi, the form supplants the place of the idea. Whereas the idea transcends the work of art and guarantees its wholeness from the outside, the form is identical with the art itself. This conception of art defines Markish’s poetic expression. His materialistic vision rejects the tradition that holds the coherence of history to be guaranteed by an all-embracing meta-historical idea. Instead, Markish strives to discern in history its dynamics and to depict them in purely geometrical terms: “Hey, boundaries of the earth! Spread. / The circle turns from Nile to Dnieper now.” If the circle is bounded by the Nile and the Dnieper rivers, it is because they are the geometric extremities—or, to use a geometric term, the tangents— of the circle of Jewish history. Yet insofar as the Nile and Dnieper represent the past and the present of Jewish history in Markish’s time, they delineate not only the geographical but also the temporal space
[79] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
Figure 1. Yosef Tchaikov’s cover illustration of the 1922 Kiev edition of Di kupe by Peretz Markish. Used by permission of Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, 2010.
of Jewish history—the space, that is, within which the circle of Jewish history turns and returns in an endless repetition of catastrophe. Markish was not the first to conceive of Jewish history as a circle. The historian Simon Dubnow wrote in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom: “Once again we are witnessing events which testify that the path of history is cyclical and not linear in evolution.”31 Dubnow identifies the linear and the cyclic as the two possible ways of describing Jewish history. Yet there is also a third possibility: a dialectical one that claims to see progress and change precisely at the moment when Jewish history appears to continue in its cyclical repetition. Within such a reading of history, the “circle” that “leaps” would suggest that the closed loop of the circle was broken and that history has taken a new direction. If the word “leap” indicates that the direction of the movement is also upward, then Markish’s circle has opened up a third dimension and becomes a spiral. This possibility is significant, given that the figure of the spiral was typically used by revolutionary thinkers to describe the dynamics of epistemological progress.32 In this sense, the transformation of the circle into a spiral would have carried revolutionary significance for Mark-
[80] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Figure 2. Propaganda poster by El Lissitzky, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” (1919). Used by permission of VG BildKunst, Bonn, 2010.
ish as well. It is as if, through these geometric figures, Markish proposes that precisely at the moment when history appears to be nothing but catastrophe, it actually uncovers its revolutionary potential. The union between the plastic and the verbal found particular expression in the 1922 Kiev edition of Di kupe. The cover illustration, created by Yosef Tchaikov (see Figure 1), depicts a circle being penetrated and broken up by the tip of a black pyramid. Inside the circle are two figures carrying a corpse, thus serving to identify the cycle of Jewish history with calamity and loss. Yet if the circle stands for Jewish history, what does the pyramid represent? By figuring the mound of corpses (presumably in Horoditch), the pyramid clearly represents Jewish history as well—or at least one of its calamities. Moreover, the two different geometrical representations—circle and pyramid— stand for the same history. Indeed, the Horoditch pogrom, according to Tchaikov’s interpretation of Markish, is part not of the repetitive and cyclical movement of Jewish history but rather of its moment of interruption and change. Both the circle and the pyramid stand for Jewish history; they signify in their mutual presence Markish’s dialectical concept of Jewish history. Figured as both circle and pyramid, the illustration reveals the dialectical view of history: precisely at the point when the catastrophe seems to be merely the continuity—that
is, a cyclical repetition—of the same, the present calamity becomes the wedge that breaks the circle. Should we need any further corroboration for the dialectical relation between the circle and the pyramid, we might briefly examine El Lissitzky’s well-known propaganda poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” from 1919 (see Figure 2). In Lissitzky’s poster, which might well have inspired Tchaikov’s, the intrusive triangle (which is red in the original) penetrating the white circle symbolizes the Bolsheviks (the Reds) beating their opponents (the Whites) during the Russian Civil War. And indeed, the comparison between Lissitzky’s and Tchaikov’s graphic works suggests the following analogy: Just as the circle in Lissitzky’s poster symbolizes the ancient political order that has to be destroyed, Tchaikov’s circle represents the cyclical historical dynamic that has to be interrupted. By comparing the illustrations of Lissitzky and Tchaikov, the dialectical concept of Jewish history in Markish’s poem is thrown into high relief. Whereas Lissitzky’s wedge stands for the Reds in opposition to the circle that symbolizes the Whites, Tchaikov’s illustration does not offer such a binary opposition in that both the circle and the pyramid represent the same thing: Jewish history as an endless repetition and as a mound of corpses, respectively. These figures suggest the dialectical intention underlying Markish’s Di kupe: the pyramid of corpses in Horoditch is not just the most recent repetition of catastrophe but also the last one. The civil war during which the corpses of Horoditch had piled up is the historical event that, by ushering in the triumph of the Revolution, will once and for all interrupt the cyclically catastrophic course of Jewish history. Of course, Horoditch was not the last atrocity, and the pogrom at its marketplace was soon overshadowed by calamities on another scale altogether. Yet the significance of Di kupe lies in allowing us to read history not as a chain of discrete and definable events but rather as the interval between these discrete points—an interval whose only certainty is that of the movement itself. In this respect, Di kupe highlights the avant-garde as a subversive gesture that both repudiates the past and flouts any order as such.
Notes An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig. I would like to thank its director,
[81] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[82] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Dan Diner, for giving me the opportunity to present my work. My reading of Peretz Markish began under the guidance of Delphine Bechtel. Her feedback has helped shape the ideas presented here. I am deeply thankful to Hana Wirth-Nesher for her sharp critical commentary in the latter stages of this article and, as always, to Yonatan Touval, whose scholarly rigor and deep literary knowledge bear greatly on my work. Except as indicated otherwise, all translations from foreign-language sources are mine. 1 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984), esp. 55–82. 2 A parallel version of Di kupe was published in Kiev in 1922. Markish scholars usually treat the Warsaw edition as the definitive one for a number of reasons, including the fact that it contains two sections the Kiev does not (i.e., 24 sections as opposed to 22). I share this scholarly preference for the Warsaw edition and will follow it throughout this article. For discussion of the different versions of Di kupe, see Avraham Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim: Apokalipsah u-meshichiyut be-sifrut yidish (Jerusalem, 2003), 309, and Seth L. Wolitz, “A Yiddish Modernist Dirge: Di Kupe of Perets Markish,” Modern Jewish Studies 6 (1987): 56–72. 3 The testimony was published by Eliezer David Rosental in his Megillat ha-tevach, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1927–31), 2: 24–25. David G. Roskies is the first to have pointed out this source. See his Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 330. 4 Nokhem Oyslender, “A kapitel zikhroynes vegn Peretz Markishen,” Di yidishe gas 2 (1993): 49–75. For more of Oyslender’s recollections, see Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim, 144–45. 5 Bialik wrote a Yiddish version of the poem, “In Shkhite Shtot,” in 1906. 6 Chana Kronfeld has already pointed out the literary closeness of Markish and Mayakovsky. For an analysis of Markish’s modernism, see her On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley, 1996), 202– 7. For a discussion of Markish’s relationship to Mayakovsky, see also Amelia Glaser, “The End of the Bazaar: Revolutionary Eschatology in Isaac Babel’s Konarmiia and Peretz Markish’s Di Kupe,’’ Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 2, no. 53 (2004): 5–32. 7 Ch. N. Bialik, Shirim: Mahadurah mada‘it be-livyat mevo’ot ve-chillufei nosach, ed. Dan Miron, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1983–2000), 2: 156. 8 Peretz Markish, Di kupe (Warsaw, 1921), 5. Except for the last stanza, the translation above is that of Leonard Wolf and appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (New York, 1987), 352–54. 9 Perets Markish, “Mit farmakhte oygn,” Bikher velt (May–June 1922): 228, 230–31. 10 For the relationship between the quest for materialistic representation
and the Jewish tradition in the poetry of Anna Margolin, see Barbara Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 501–36. 11 Markish, Di kupe, 30. Translation by Wolf in Howe et al., Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 366. 12 Markish, “Mit farmakhte oygn,” 234–35. 13 Wolitz is interested in exploring the liturgical structure underlying Di kupe. Although Di kupe repays such an exploration, my own reading of the poem suggests that any attempt to situate the poem within a single organizing structure is undermined by the poem’s formal openness. See Wolitz, “A Yiddish Modernist Dirge.” 14 Itskhok Nusinov, “Fun natsyonaln troyer tsu sotsyaln mut,” Di royte velt, no. 8 (Aug. 1929), 95. 15 Dov Ber Malkin, “Oyf der grenets fun doyres,” Bikher velt 6–7 (July 1929): 3. 16 Translation by Wolf, except for the second line in the fourth stanza and the second line in the last stanza. In the first instance, I prefer to render geshendt as “desecrated” rather than “dishonored” (as in Wolf’s translation); in the second, I prefer to render opvarfekhtsn as “leftovers” rather than “rubbish” (as in Wolf’s translation). Howe et al., Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 356–58. 17 In this context, it is important to note Roskies’ argument that residual elements of Jewish tradition inform the reactions of even the most ostensibly secular Jewish Yiddish writers to catastrophe: “Yet even of Markish it can be said that the liturgical framework creates a construct as timeless as the texts it sets to subvert” (Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 100). 18 Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York, 1961), 257. 19 More specifically, the tirade is followed by the blessing that opens the section of the morning service called pesukei de-zimra’. 20 Markish, Di kupe, 9. In the first line, the Yiddish word “fayg” denotes not only the middle finger but also a fig. The double meaning is significant since it both invokes a piercing finger and calls to mind the biblical landscape. 21 Group Mu manifesto, 1978, cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 1986), 47. 22 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 83–84. 23 Peretz Markish, Farbaygeyendik: Oyf di vegn fun yiddisher dikhtung (Vilna, 1921), 31. 24 Circumstantial evidence of this intimacy between artists and writers can be found in the series of discussions that the Kultur Lige organized with Yiddish writers and poets, including Markish. See Seth L. Wolitz, “The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia,” in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912– 1928, ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem, 1988), 39.
[83] Peretz Markish’s Di kupe
•
Roy Greenwald
[84] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
25 Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 503. 26 The term “cubo-futurism” originally designated a group of Russian poets influenced by French cubism and Italian futurism. It was later applied to a group of Russian artists. 27 Glaser, “The End of the Bazaar,” has already pointed out this futurist aspect of Di kupe. 28 See Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim, 145, and Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 99. 29 Peretz Markish, Di kupe (page not indicated). Translation by Wolf, with the exception of the line “Leap upon a millstone; leap upon an arc.” For Wolf, see Howe et al., Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 356. 30 Henryk Berlewi, “In kamf far der nayer form,” Ringen 1 (1921): 31–33. 31 Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on New and Old Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia, 1958), 192 32 Lenin’s language is illustrative: “Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral.” See his “On the Question of Dialectics,” in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow, 1965), 38: 221. .
Robert Weltsch and the Paradoxes of AntiNationalist Nationalism Stefan Vogt A bstr act This article analyzes the specific version of Zionism developed in Central Europe by examining the life and work of Robert Weltsch. Born in Prague in 1891, Weltsch was the editor of the official journal of the German Zionist federation, the Jüdische Rundschau, from 1919 until 1938. I trace the impact of German nationalist ideology and politics on Weltsch’s thinking, arguing that he developed an ambivalent concept of Jewish nationalism that cannot be identified as either ethnic or civic. Weltsch criticized liberal ideology and affirmed völkisch ideas of national community while rejecting national chauvinism and embracing universal humanity. Weltsch’s Zionism was an attempt to fulfill the cultural aspirations of völkisch nationalism and yet to avoid its political consequences. His ideas remained an unsolved contradiction and, though supported by many German Zionists, were thus not able to shape the politics of the Zionist movement and the political reality in Palestine. Key words: Robert Weltsch, Zionism, Germany, nationalism
I
n September 1924, Robert Weltsch, editor of the Jüdische Rundschau, the official journal of the German Zionist organization, wrote an article for the Rosh Hashanah edition that contained the following remarkable passage: “Zionism cannot be realized under the banner of nationalism. Zionism can only be realized under the banner of overcoming nationalism.”1 Considering the fact that Zionism actually was, and still is, the most important version of Jewish nationalism, Weltsch called for nothing less than an anti-nationalist nationalism. This strange and obviously contradictory concept, however, was not just a personal oddity on the part of its author. With his statement, Stefan Vogt, “Robert Weltsch and the Paradoxes of Anti-Nationalist Nationalism,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 16, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2010): 85–115
[86] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Weltsch represented a current within the Zionist movement that advocated a particularly moderate realization of Jewish national aspirations and was especially strong within the Central European chapters of the movement. Many Zionists in German-speaking countries were convinced that Zionism should aim not at a powerful and homogeneous Jewish nation-state but rather at the spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation and reconciliation with the Arab world. This inclination of Central European Zionism toward a relatively moderate version of nationalism has been explained either with reference to the liberal and humanist intellectual tradition of Central European Jewry or as a reaction to the increasingly chauvinist ethnonationalism that came to dominate many of the nationalist movements and ideologies in Central Europe.2 Both explanations draw attention to the relations between Jewish nationalism and the predominantly non-Jewish societies in which it developed. However, they do not account for the fact that many of the protagonists of this moderate Zionism developed and advocated ethnic or even völkisch versions of nationalism.3 Martin Buber, for example, employed concepts of blood and community that were prominent in German völkisch ideologies.4 Weltsch, too, defined the Jewish Volk as “a community of blood and destiny.”5 In this article, I suggest a different explanation by tracing the tension between liberal and völkisch versions of nationalism in Weltsch’s work. I argue that he developed his Zionism from an ambivalent position toward both völkisch and liberal ideas. While deeply rooted in both traditions, he criticized and rejected what he considered their negative elements and consequences. These two sides, however, were not separate and unrelated parts of an inconsistent ideology but were intertwined elements of a complex attempt to reformulate nationalism in an anti-nationalist spirit. This ambivalent position was the result of Weltsch’s own confrontation with European and especially German nationalism. In order to under stand the peculiarities of Weltsch’s Zionism, and of Central European Zionism in general, it is therefore necessary to consider Weltsch’s nationalism not just as a reaction to but also as an integral part of the German and Central European debates on the nation. The relationship between German and Jewish nationalism has been recognized since 1967, when George Mosse published his groundbreaking essay “The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry.”6 Other studies on German Zionism, however, have presented the movement as a rather isolated phenomenon and concentrated on internal debates among the Zionists.7 Elsewhere, scholars have contextualized the history of German Zionism, but they have been inter-
ested mainly in the conflict between the Zionist and the assimilationist camp of German Jewry.8 These studies often focus on the question of whether the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland or the liberal Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens provided the more appropriate strategy against antisemitism and Nazism.9 Only in the past two decades has Mosse’s suggestion been taken up again and inspired a range of new work on the relationship between Zionist and non-Jewish discourses in Germany. Scholars have been particularly interested in how Zionists participated in and appropriated discourses of German sociological, medical, anthropological, and racial sciences.10 They have discussed how Zionist scientists and intellectuals tried to confront the problem of Jewish identity in the face of the double threat of antisemitism and assimilation. These studies show the extent to which Zionist ideas were part of the general intellectual development in Central Europe. These questions have also been applied to the Zionist debates on the nation and on their understanding of Zionist nationalism. A series of dissertations have recently been written at Israeli universities that analyze Central European Zionist nationalism in relation to the national ideologies and politics of the general societies.11 All of these studies emphasize the tension between the deep entrenchment of German-speaking Zionism in German idealistic, neo-Romantic, and even völkisch traditions, on the one hand, and its attempts to challenge these very traditions, on the other. From this tension, Germanspeaking Zionists developed their own specific concepts of nationalist ideology. The new approaches to Zionism are part of a larger development in German-Jewish historiography. Scholars such as Marion Kaplan, Till van Rahden, and Ulrich Sieg have produced important studies in which Jewish history is conceived not as distinct from but as an inseparable part of German history.12 In this article, I add another piece to this picture by focusing on Weltsch in order to study the consequences of the relationship between German and Jewish nationalism for the development of Zionist ideology. Weltsch was born in Prague in 1891, when the city was part of the Habsburg Empire and a major center of Jewish life.13 He grew up in an acculturated German-Jewish family that belonged to the intellectual and moderately well-to-do middle class. As a law student at the Prague German University, Weltsch became a member of the Zionist student organization Bar Kochba and immersed himself in the rich intellectual life of Prague Zionism. In August 1914, he became a soldier in the Austrian army and served on Austria’s eastern front. After the war, Weltsch worked as a journalist in Vienna before moving to
[87] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[88] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Germany in December 1919 to become editor of the official journal of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, the Jüdische Rundschau. In this capacity, he was one of the most prominent Zionists in Weimar Germany. His articles in the Jüdische Rundschau received attention not only within the German Zionist movement but also on the stages of international Zionism.14 During these years, Weltsch was a close confidant of the president of the Zionist Organization (which became the World Zionist Organization in 1960), Chaim Weizmann, whom he supported along with the majority of the German Zionists against challenges from the Zionist right wing. Weltsch was among the initiators of the dovish group Brit Shalom and belonged to its radical core, which called for the establishment of a binational commonwealth in Palestine. After the Nazis assumed power in 1933, he remained the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau and made the journal an important source for Jewish self-esteem during the years to come.15 After the newspaper was closed down in 1938, Weltsch immigrated to Palestine, where he co-founded the German-language journal Jüdische Welt-Rundschau and worked for the newspaper Ha-’arets. After World War II, he went to London as a correspondent for Ha-’arets, and he was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Leo Baeck Institute, whose Year Book he edited until 1978. Weltsch died in Jerusalem in 1982. The initial context for Weltsch’s Zionism was the cultural and intellectual environment of late-nineteenth-century Prague, where about 25,000 mostly German-speaking Jews lived together with about 10,000 non-Jewish Germans and more than 400,000 Czechs.16 The relationship between these groups was close but also in the process of rapid transformation as Germans, Czechs, and Jews developed ever more radical nationalist ideas. Antisemitism, too, grew among both Germans and Czechs. Thus, Prague was not only a meeting point of three nations but also a hothouse for both conflict and cultural interaction between these groups. The Jewish minority was a particularly vibrant community that produced many important intellectuals, most notably Franz Kafka, and a specific brand of Zionist ideology. Inspired by the ideas of Ahad Ha‘am, friends and classmates of Kafka such as Hugo Bergmann, Max Brod, and Weltsch’s older cousin Felix developed a concept of “cultural” Zionism that concentrated on the mystical dimension of Judaism rather than on a political solution of the “Jewish Question.”17 To Bergmann and his friends, Zionism meant to engage first and foremost in the spiritual renewal of the Jewish people. Bergmann was also strongly influenced by the philosophy of German idealism and especially by Immanuel Kant. Like other German idealistic thinkers,
however, he departed from Kant when he criticized the liberal and rational worldview of the nineteenth century and instead strove to revive Jewish traditions and ideas.18 As a consequence, Bergmann’s Zionism was characterized by the adoption of concepts from neo-Romanticism and Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy). In this regard, Prague Zionists participated in the anti-liberal and anti-rational tendencies that were so typical of the young generation of non-Jewish bourgeoisie in fin-desiècle Central Europe. Once Bergmann joined Bar Kochba in 1901, that student organization became the most important institution of Prague Zionism.19 Many notable Zionist intellectuals started their Zionist careers in Bar Kochba. Among them were Hugo and Leo Hermann, Oskar Epstein (who later became Weltsch’s brother-in-law), and Weltsch’s close friend Hans Kohn. Weltsch himself became a member in 1909 and was its chairman in the academic year of 1911–12. As a student, he was thus closely integrated into the peculiar cultural Zionist discourse conducted in and around Bar Kochba. When the organization started to cooperate with Buber, who was the most influential exponent of cultural Zionism in Central Europe, this orientation became even more dominant. The cooperation with Buber also reinforced the influence of contemporary neo-Romantic and völkisch ideology on Bar Kochba. In his famous lectures “Drei Reden über das Judentum,” which he delivered in Prague in 1909 and 1910, Buber claimed that the awareness of one’s being part of a nation requires the “discovery of the blood as the root-like, nourishing force inside of each person, the discovery that the most fundamental elements of our being is determined by the blood, that our thinking and our will is fundamentally influenced by it.” 20 In 1914, Bar Kochba and Buber together published the anthology Vom Judentum, which was pervaded by a spirit of anti-liberalism and anti-rationalism.21 Bar Kochba’s philosophy in the years preceding World War I was thus to participate in the intellectual atmosphere that characterized large segments of bourgeois culture of fin-de-siècle Central Europe. Yet Buber also helped to infuse a peculiar note into the völkisch nationalism of Bar Kochba. He maintained that the yearning for völkisch identity was common to the people of all nations and that such an identity would not only provide wholeness to every individual person but also produce harmony between nations.22 To Buber, Jewish nationalism had the universalistic mission to redeem humanity. Similar statements could be found from members of Bar Kochba and the Prague Zionist circles. For Bergmann, the redemption of the Jewish nation was to be achieved not by establishing territorial sovereignty over the land of
[89] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[90] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
I srael but by its spiritual rebirth. In this way, Jews would lead all nations to humanity.23 Kohn, who later became the most outspoken critic of Zionist nationalism, was at that time still much more radical in his völkisch ideology than Bergmann but already maintained that Zionism meant “to take seriously one’s Judaism and one’s humanism.” 24 To be sure, neo-Romantic and essentialist concepts were clearly dominant within the thinking of the Prague Zionists, and the advocacy of humanism became central only after World War I. However, it was this peculiarly ambivalent version of nationalism, containing both völkisch and universalistic elements, that provided the background for Weltsch’s endeavors to develop his version of Zionism. In May 1912 at a Bar Kochba meeting, Weltsch gave a lecture on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the occasion of the philosopher’s 150th birthday.25 Weltsch’s lecture testified to the immense impact of the German philosopher on Zionist ideology in Germany and Central Europe.26 Bergmann noted in 1915 that Fichte was crucial to his generation’s understanding of Judaism. “Only because we had Fichte,” he wrote to Buber, “we found the appropriate currents within Jewish culture and understood Judaism.” 27 Not only did the Zionists cherish Fichte’s emphasis on the “Volk” as the central category of history, but they also appreciated that Fichte conceived of philosophy and politics as being essentially the same. With Fichte, the Zionists could assume that their intellectual endeavors were indeed capable of shaping reality and that their nationalist politics were deeply rooted in ethical principles. Even more important, Fichte’s understanding of the German Volk as being distinct from all other peoples and therefore entrusted with a historical mission could easily be identified with the Zionists’ idea of the Jewish Volk being unique and chosen, especially as it resonated well with traditional Jewish concepts of chosenness. Nahum Goldmann wrote in 1916 that the national idea of Germans and Jews shared “the conviction that a certain mission given by the Weltgeist, the genius of history or god . . . constitutes the reason and the meaning of the national existence.” This idea, Goldmann added, was most clearly developed by the “founder and master of the German national theory,” Fichte.28 In his lecture from May 1912, Weltsch quoted extensively from Fichte’s “Reden an die deutsche Nation.” Every Zionist, he argued, should read this work in order to realize that “the questions, which have been asked about the existence of the Volk that is today the leading Kulturvolk [cultured people], are exactly the same questions we are asking about our Jewish Volk today.” 29 Weltsch compared the German situation during the so-called “wars of liberation” against French hegemony in Germany, when Fichte published his “Reden,”
with the situation of Jews in his time, and he claimed that both situations were in many ways similar. Weltsch called on his fellow Jews to take to heart what Fichte had preached to the Germans: That they belonged to their Volk by virtue of nature, but that they still needed to affirm consciously and willingly this belonging. For Weltsch, Fichte’s “Reden” had much to teach Jews. “We,” he concluded, “who are part of a different national movement than the Germans, feel each and every word as if it were directed at us.”30 However, Weltsch referred to Fichte in a quite distinctive and even selective manner. He explicitly avowed Fichte’s definition of the Volk as an eternal and organically self-reproducing community with a distinctive character that gave meaning to the life of the individual. In accordance with the German philosopher, he claimed that the fate of the individual was identical with the fate of the Volk. The meaning and the continuity of the individual’s work, wrote Weltsch, is only guaranteed by the continuity of the nation.31 When it came to politics, however, what mattered most to Weltsch were not Fichte’s accomplishments as a leader of the national movement against French domination but his role as an educator of the German people. According to Weltsch, Fichte was frustrated by the demoralization and moral corruption of the Germans after Napoleon had defeated Prussia. The German Volk could only continue to exist if it was able to overcome this state of mind.32 Weltsch claimed that Zionism should follow Fichte in aspiring first and foremost to the self-education of the Jewish people. The aim of such an education would be to get rid of the selfishness and the slave mentality that took hold of the Jewish people, and to achieve human morality.33 Only then would the Jewish people be able to accomplish its national goals. “If we educate the Jewish people to human morality,” concluded Weltsch, “it will also become replete with the spirit that enables the individual to serve a great cause.”34 While sharing Fichte’s ideas on the völkisch substance of the nation, Weltsch chose to adopt only humanity from his political positions and to ignore anti-French chauvinism and antisemitism, both of which were prominent in Fichte’s political philosophy. About a year later, Weltsch gave another lecture, entitled “Weltbürgertum und Nationalismus.”35 The title referred to the book of the prominent German historian Friedrich Meinecke, “Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat,” in which Meinecke described the creation of the German nation-state.36 In this lecture, Weltsch discussed the relationship between nationalism and the ideals of the enlightenment. He again referred to Fichte and his “eminently ethical conception of nationalism”37 but also to Romantic authors such as Novalis (pseudonym
[91] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[92] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
of Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Johann Gottfried Herder. The cultural Zionism of Buber and his occupation with Jewish mysticism were heavily inspired by German Romanticism.38 However, when the cultural Zionists referred to Romanticism, they did so in a mode that was similar to the appropriation of Romanticism by German fin-de-siècle nationalism.39 This neo-Romantic approach was strongly indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche. Buber was particularly enthusiastic about Nietzsche, whom he considered to embody his own radical critique of the liberal-bourgeois world. “It came like a revelation to me,” he confessed about his encounter with Nietzsche, “like a glorious, imperious storm out of a bright and pure Hellenic sky.”40 Other German and Austrian Zionists, too, referred to the German philosopher in order to find inspiration for their ideas on Jewish culture and identity.41 Nietzsche provided these Zionists not only with a powerful philosophical framework to criticize the assumed degeneration of Jewish life in Europe but also with an idea of the basis for an alternative culture. He was thus particularly interesting for the Zionists as a founder of Lebensphilosophie, as a “herald of life,” as Buber put it in 1900.42 In addition, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf Eucken, and Georg Simmel had strong influences on the cultural Zionists in Germany and in Austria. Zionism, wrote Kohn in 1912, employing all the emphatic vocabulary of this philosophy, stems from the mythical basis of existence: “It is a certain feeling about what constitutes life, and it wants to prevail.” 43 Ideas drawn from neo-Romanticism and Lebensphilosophie also informed the lecture that Weltsch gave to Bar Kochba in 1913. This is obvious in the initial statement about his understanding of nationalism, even though he credited these ideas primarily to Buber: “Since Buber, we can identify the two elements of our position: first, the affirmation of Judaism, which appeals to us from our blood, as the decisive force of our lives; [and] second, the affirmation of the value of our living Jewish community as a creative Lebensgemeinschaft [symbiosis].”44 In his talk, Weltsch discussed the development of the national idea in Germany as the background for the emergence of Jewish nationalism. Though rooted in the Enlightenment, German nationalism differed from French nationalism in that it never focused on the individual. Instead, it developed the idea of humanity. Yet according to Weltsch, Herder had already realized that the most valuable culture flourishes only on the basis of the nation. Germany’s foremost thinkers in the early nineteenth century, he claimed, thus overcame both the cosmopolitan and the individualist ideas of the Enlightenment. Instead, they created Romanticism. However, Romanticism preserved the Enlightenment’s ideal of humanity, which was essential to what Weltsch considered to be
true nationalism: “Romanticism is the most interesting crossbreed of national and universal ideas. The Romanticists recognize that all human work comes from the source of unconscious Volkstum [nationhood]. At the same time, their religious sense leads them to long for the infinite and to connect to the universe.” 45 These quotations contain the leitmotif of Weltsch’s nationalism. National identity is defined in terms that are strongly reminiscent of contemporary völkisch ideology, but it is also conceived as a vehicle to achieve a universalistic goal, which for its part is taken from the Enlightenment’s most cosmopolitan principles. Yet this universalistic goal—humanity—is understood as a means to overcome the individualism and the lack of community that again characterized Enlightenment thought. In Weltsch’s nationalism, both elements were inseparably intertwined. This was not only a theoretical conception but also a reaction to the national conflict in Prague and other parts of the Habsburg Empire. It was an attempt to reconcile this conflict in the framework of a Nationalitätenstaat (multinational state), where different national groups could live side by side in peace and mutual respect.46 However, Weltsch’s lectures demonstrate that this idea was conceived in strictly nationalist categories that were adopted from neo-Romanticism and Lebensphilosophie. His ideas on nationalism were part and parcel of the same national conflict he wanted to reconcile. In these initial statements and in the social and political reality that shaped them, we can thus find the basis for the paradoxes of Weltsch’s nationalism. A few months after Weltsch gave this talk, the life of the Prague Zionists and their debates about the nature of Jewish nationalism were deeply disturbed by the war. Like most other Jews in Germany and Austria, the Zionists joined the patriotic wave that swept across their societies and affected most profoundly the young bourgeoisie. In the first edition of the Jüdische Rundschau that was published after the outbreak of the war, Heinrich Loewe wrote that “as German citizens, we Zionists will joyfully sacrifice our property, our life, and our blood.”47 Buber expressed his excitement both publicly and privately. “Never before did I feel the idea of the Volk to be as real as in these weeks,” he wrote to Kohn in September 1914.48 The enthusiasm of the Zionists was fed by the conviction that the war proved them right in conceiving Jewish identity in nationalist terms. Like many young Zionists, Weltsch served in the Austrian army. As a soldier on Austria’s eastern front, however, he soon lost whatever illusions he might have had in August 1914 about the war. In his letters home, he bemoaned not only the misery of the Jewish masses he encountered in the east but also the general violence and devastation.49 The war dra-
[93] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[94] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
matically changed the political landscape in which Zionism in general and the Prague Zionists in particular had to act. At its end, the Habsburg Empire disintegrated into several successor states, and revolutions rocked nearly every society in Central and Eastern Europe. Most important, the idea of the multinational state was replaced almost everywhere, but especially in Austria-Hungary, by the concept of the nation-state. Back from the front, Weltsch observed this development as a journalist, first in Vienna and then, from 1919 on as the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau, in Berlin. In November 1918, Weltsch reported from Vienna for Buber’s journal Der Jude about the transformation of the former Habsburg Empire.50 His article started with an evaluation of the reasons for the empire’s collapse. The dynasty, Weltsch argued, disregarded the striving for national self-determination of all but the two ruling nations— German and Hungarian—inside the empire. Instead of solving the problem, this ignorance only antagonized the nations even more. Weltsch noted that many states had this same attitude toward Jews. According to Weltsch, the establishment of separate nation-states was an inevitable consequence of the existence of several nations within the empire—one of which was the Jewish nation—and the empire’s neglect of this fact. However, Weltsch argued, this development was not necessarily to the benefit of Jews. The multinational state, which in theory, though not in reality, was the basis of the Habsburg Empire, would have been a much better environment for the nations, including Jews, to exercise their right to self-determination. The nation-state, in contrast, was no way to achieve the liberation of all nations because it would always create national minorities. Here again, the situation of Jews served as an example for Weltsch. Despite all its flaws, the Habsburg Empire at least provided some protection for them. With this protection gone, Jews had only one choice: to identify and to organize as a nation as well. The consequences of the collapse of the empire, as Weltsch saw them, were therefore threefold. First, the ideal of the multi-national state had failed; second, the nation-state provided no real alternative to it; and third, Jews had to accommodate to the reality of nation-states and nationalism just the same. Before Weltsch moved from Vienna to Berlin, he published another article in Der Jude, entitled “Nationalismus und Sozialismus.” 51 Again, general political developments, in this case socialist movements and revolutions, set the stage for the discussion. After the end of the war, Weltsch was increasingly drawn toward a socialist orientation and eventually joined the non-Marxist socialist party Ha-Po‘el Ha-Tsa‘ir.52 In his article, he argued that Zionism should support so-
cialism in its struggle against capitalism, as it would otherwise lose the younger generation. Yet more fundamental reasons led to Weltsch’s call for a synthesis of nationalism and socialism. Socialism, he claimed, “has almost the same roots as nationalism: it arises from the need for genuine community, just as nationalism arises from the need for intellectual integration into a community.”53 According to Weltsch, both nationalism and socialism were based on the ideas of community and humanity. Socialism so far had failed to realize these ideas and instead clung to the materialist ideology of bourgeois society. Weltsch’s rejection of materialist socialism was deeply indebted to the ideas of ethical socialism that were cultivated in Ha-Po‘el HaTsa‘ir.54 However, it was also informed by a völkisch notion of community. The adoption of elements of völkisch nationalism was indeed very common among ethical socialists in Germany. 55 In this same vein, Weltsch criticized liberal forms of nationalism. Both liberal nationalism and materialist socialism, he argued, descended from the flawed ideology of enlightened rationalism, which had to be overcome. Instead, socialism should adopt the irrational ideas of völkisch nationalism: “The essential relationship between human beings is that of intrinsic, blood-determined, myth-determined, unalienable natural and spiritual . . . bonds, before which the true socialist has to bow with awe.”56 Whereas the fate of Austria-Hungary had constituted the background for his thoughts about Jewish nationalism in Vienna, it was the political situation in Germany that influenced Weltsch in a similar way from the time he arrived in Berlin. When he moved to the German capital at the end of 1919, the city was still trying to recover from the violent confrontations of the revolution while facing new waves of political upheaval. The early 1920s were particularly marked by right-wing and nationalist violence such as the Kapp-Putsch in March 1920, when right-wing officers tried to topple the democratic government of the Weimar Republic, and the assassinations of former finance minister Matthias Erzberger in 1921 and foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922.57 A variety of völkisch organizations challenged the newly founded democracy, one of which was the tiny National Socialist Party, whose leader, Adolf Hitler, attempted another right-wing coup d’état in 1923. Even beyond the radical right, nationalism was widespread in postwar Germany, reaching a climax in 1923 during the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr area.58 Antisemitism, which had been an essential feature of most of the right-wing ideology in the Weimar Republic, once again made it into the headlines in 1923 as well. During the first years after the war, antisemitic organizations had gained
[95] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[96] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
strength, and violence against Jews had become a recurring feature of political life. In the autumn of 1923, however, the situation escalated as anti-Jewish riots took place in several German cities, beginning in Beuthen in Upper Silesia and culminating in the Scheunenviertel pogrom in Berlin on November 5. On that day, an antisemitic mob raided the neighborhood where many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe lived. They looted shops and apartments, attacked anyone they considered Jewish, and left two people dead.59 These events sent shockwaves through all parts of the German Jewish population, but the Zionists drew the most radical conclusions when they insisted that the pogroms demonstrated the precarious situation of Jews in Germany and thus signaled “the hour of destiny for German Jews.”60 This was, of course, directed primarily against the liberal and assimilationist camp of German Jewry that was represented by the Centralverein. However, the Jüdische Rundschau was also directly confronting the radicalization of völkisch nationalism and antisemitism in Germany. Already in May 1923, Robert Weltsch stated that “in Germany, the hatred against Jews is currently at its peak.”61 In his comments on the incidents in Berlin in November, he wrote that “the atmosphere in Germany is charged with antisemitism” and remarked that the Germans would still have to reach a level of civilization that would allow them to respect the differences between peoples.62 Weltsch was very much aware of the political developments in Germany, and he used his observations directly as an argument against what he considered a wrong and ultimately disastrous Zionist policy. Referring to the growing right-wing radicalism, for instance, he noted in a letter to Kohn that German and Zionist politics were strikingly similar.63 While Germany was struggling with its postwar crisis, Palestine saw the first major confrontations between Arabs and Jews. Since the end of World War I, Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine had deteriorated. In April 1920, riots took place in Jerusalem that left nine people—five Jews and four Arabs—dead and almost 250 injured. They were followed by even more violent riots with almost 100 dead, about half of them Jewish, in May 1921.64 In this situation, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had led Jewish self-defense against the rioting Arabs in 1920, intensified his call for the reestablishment of the Jewish legion that had been gradually dismantled since the end of the war.65 He was convinced that the riots of 1920 and 1921 were just the beginning of major violent confrontations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and that the British mandatory power would not be willing to guarantee the safety of the Jewish population. The idea of a Jewish legion was controversial among the Zionist leadership, especially as it was
part of Jabotinsky’s general tendency to dissent from mainstream Zionist policy. Jabotinsky claimed that the Zionist leadership was far too compromising in its position vis-à-vis the British government and the Arab national aspirations. In January 1923, he left the Zionist Executive to form an opposition party within the Zionist organization that subsequently became the Revisionist movement.66 Debate about the political and military strategies reflected conflicting attitudes among the Zionists toward the use of force for the defense and expansion of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.67 Writing from Berlin, Weltsch was not directly affected by these questions, but he nevertheless vehemently opposed Revisionism and the idea of a Jewish legion. He had a completely different understanding of what was necessary to secure the future and the viability of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. “The future of Palestine can only be guaranteed by a close Jewish-Arab alliance,” he wrote in August 1921.68 Weltsch took a central role in organizing opposition against Jabotinsky’s ideas on the Arab policy within the World Zionist Organization. He convinced Buber to speak on this issue and to submit a resolution to the Zionist Congress in Karlsbad in 1921 that should express the Zionist commitment to share Palestine with its Arab population and to waive any claim of dominance.69 The evolving conflict within the Zionist movement about the “Arab question,” for which the congress was an important stage, led ultimately to the establishment of the Brit Shalom group, of which Weltsch was a leading figure.70 Yet Weltsch’s passionate critique of Jabotinsky had a domestic motive, too. In his article “Die Legion” from 1921, Weltsch argued that the history of Austria-Hungary and its successor states proved that, if minorities took to armed struggle against the majority, this would sow the seeds of eternal enmity. It was no coincidence, he said, that exactly in the southern provinces of the Austrian empire, where the German minority was armed against the Slavs, “the dagger was sharpened that gave the coup de grâce to Austria.”71 In his final analysis, he compared Jabotinsky’s strategy with that of the Germans in World War I.72 In both cases, he argued, the resort to military means had been justified as a measure of defense, and both times this justification was a lie. Even more important, Jabotinsky’s entire ideology reminded Weltsch of the ideology of violence that came to dominate most of Europe during the war and still dominated it. According to Weltsch, Jabotinsky himself was a protagonist of this dangerous development: The worst effect of the idea of the legion is that it produces a wrong ideal and a wrong romanticism among our youth. . . . [Jabotinsky] b elieves that
[97] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[98] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
only through the rebirth of a heroic, soldierly spirit one can activate the forces that enable the Volk to live again. This is the ideational basis of the whole legion movement, and this is why Jabotinsky is pleased to see that a time of battles has obviously arrived. He sets his hope on the “Stahlbad” [literally, “bath of steel”].73
We can see from this quotation how strongly Weltsch’s evaluation was influenced by the experiences he had during the war and with postwar German nationalism, from which he even borrowed the term “Stahlbad.” His interpretation of Zionist policy and ideology was determined by the intention to draw a firm line between European radical nationalism on the one side and Zionism on the other. This is also evident in his comments on the fascists’ “March on Rome” in 1922. Weltsch emphasized that postwar radical nationalism, of which he considered fascism to be a variant, was almost always directed against Jews and that in Germany it had proven to be particularly antisemitic. He also claimed that Zionism had completely different characteristics from fascism and radical nationalism. Whereas radical nationalists believed that a nation could only flourish in a war of everyone against everyone, Zionism could only succeed in an atmosphere of peace and reconciliation among the nations.74 When Heinrich Margulies submitted an article to the Jüdische Rundschau in 1924 in which he claimed that fascism and Zionism were essentially similar, Weltsch lamented in a letter to Kohn that he would not be able to decline the contribution of this “crazy, terrible person.” 75 To Margulies, he wrote in a somewhat more restrained tone that he sharply disagreed with the identification of Zionism and fascism. According to Weltsch, it was no option for Zionism to support fascism “either ideologically or politically,” as “fascism is the ideology of the radical right in almost every country. Just think of Poland, Romania, and not least Germany.” 76 Fascism, and more generally the political situation in Europe, showed Weltsch the negative aspects of nationalism, especially its inherent tendency to produce violence. From these negative aspects, Weltsch wanted Zionism to be saved. However, Weltsch wanted to retain nationalism in its völkisch version as the ideological basis for Zionism. In his letter to Margulies, he reiterated his belief that Fichte “and other protagonists of the idea of German national rebirth” were ideological inspirations for Zionism.77 The Zionist movement, he wrote in 1926, expressed the “longing of the Volk for a life that is natural, earthbound, and integrated into the universe” and had reconstituted the Jewish Volk as a “unified organism.”78 On the occasion of Buber’s 50th birthday in 1928, Weltsch again cor-
roborated that Zionism meant the “affirmation of the Jewish Volkstum inside of us, of the ‘blood’ as the formative force of our experience.” 79 His main goal was to distinguish Zionism from German and European nationalism, but he still felt obliged to confirm their common intellectual foundations. This included a certain amount of sympathy for German völkisch nationalism. In several private letters to Kohn, Weltsch admitted his admiration of radical nationalist ideology as it most radically broke with the bourgeois tradition. Because of the “ethical, purifying tendency” of their nationalism, he wrote to Kohn in November 1922, he preferred the radical nationalist parties to all others. “At least,” he added, “in theory.”80 To be sure, Weltsch insisted that neither fascism nor radical nationalism was a potential ally for Zionism or provided a valid example for its political strategy. Their ideologies, however, were not to be altogether rejected. It was not the ethnic and völkisch nationalism of the radical right that Weltsch opposed but rather how the radical right translated these ideas into politics. In the second half of the 1920s, the situation in Palestine and the deteriorating relationship between Jews and Arabs increasingly dominated Zionist debates. This was also the immediate background for Weltsch’s statements on the problem of nationalism during those years. However, his articles reveal that the political developments in Germany and Europe still had an equally strong impact on his thinking. This is especially obvious in his article “Unser Nationalismus” in December 1925.81 The initial topic of the article was the plan to celebrate Hanukkah in Jerusalem by parading with the flag of the Jewish legion in the streets of the city. Weltsch used this incident to address fundamental problems of nationalism in general and Zionism in particular. For both his critique on the planned Hanukkah parade and his theoretical discussion of Jewish nationalism, he referred to European, and especially German, nationalism. If Jews paraded with military pomp in Jerusalem, Weltsch claimed, they would display the attitude of being “masters” of the country. This would not only be a provocation to the Arab population and therefore thwart any efforts to win their confidence but also assimilate Zionism to the pretentious and histrionic nationalism of other nations. “Who hasn’t laughed painfully about the imbecile and pompous philistinism of the veterans’ associations around the world,” Weltsch asked, evoking to his readers the omnipresence of such associations in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.82 Turning to the problems of Zionism in general, he referred to the radicalization of nationalism all over the continent and to the devastation caused by this development. European nationalism in general and German Zionism in particular provided the empiric material for Weltsch to identify what he
[99] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[100] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
did not want to characterize Jewish nationalism: self-righteousness, pomposity, and national egoism. Instead, Jewish nationalism should essentially be one of self-critique. “Nationalism,” he concluded, “means elevation of the nation, but this is inconceivable without recognizing and denouncing, even hating, one’s own mistakes, if one’s own sleep of oblivion is not constantly interrupted by the eternal warning voice of the conscience.”83 Weltsch held this position even after the Arab riots in August 1929.84 By emphasizing the role of Jewish—especially Revisionist— provocations in sparking the riots, Weltsch provoked harsh critique from all parts of the Zionist movement. His insistence on the necessity of reconciliation with the Palestinian Arabs, even after 133 Jews (as well as 116 Arabs) were killed, deprived Weltsch of whatever sympathy he might still have had among the leadership of the Yishuv and even caused a temporary estrangement from Weizmann.85 He also received messages of dissent and protest from several German Zionists who cancelled their subscriptions to the Jüdische Rundschau.86 In the end, however, the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland and its president, Kurt Blumenfeld, supported Weltsch. He was confirmed as the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau at the convention of the German Zionist Organization in Jena in December 1929.87 When he had summarized his arguments in October 1929, Weltsch still claimed that Zionism should not share the self-righteousness of other manifestations of nationalism.88 Jewish nationalism, he maintained, was exceptional in two ways: its aim was to liberate the Jewish people from the spiritual slavery of the ghetto, and it had the universalistic mission to create just relations among the nations. The Zionist reaction to the Arab revolt reminded Weltsch of the German attitude during World War I, which he considered characteristic of the brand of nationalism he opposed. Those Zionists who replaced the real events with tales of heroism showed the mentality “of a hinterland heroism that is well-known to all of us. They have a need for encouraging war reports and cannot hear enough about the victories of their own forces and the defeats of the enemies, whether true or not.”89 In his evaluation of Zionist politics regarding the 1929 riots, Weltsch once again referred to the experience he had with European, and especially German, nationalism. German nationalism provided a powerful contrast to his idea of Jewish nationalism, because the former completely lacked a perspective beyond its own self-interest. However, in many ways German nationalism also provided an important positive model for what he wanted Jewish nationalism to be. In December 1931, Weltsch devoted long sections of a lead article in
the Jüdische Rundschau to this topic.90 The article appeared at the time of the National Socialists’ rapid rise, and it tried to understand the intellectual background of this development. Weltsch left no doubt that the new nationalism (which he identified as this background) was aggressively antisemitic, that it was the enemy of all Jews (including the Zionists), and that it was necessary to organize Jewish self- defense. Yet he also found several elements that Zionism and the new German nationalism had in common. Just as Zionism was based on the discovery of “blood” as the most decisive factor of human existence, the new German nationalism was “blood-determined and racedevout.” 91 Both Zionism and the new German nationalism rejected rationalism, turning toward instinct and religious ideas instead. Weltsch showed a high degree of understanding for this nationalism’s hostility toward liberal ideology and politics. “We Zionists,” he wrote, “have started our movement as a protest against Jewish individualism, motivated by the longing for creative community. We see feelings among the German youth to which we, of all nations, should be particularly sympathetic.” 92 Zionism, he concluded, shared its intellectual roots with the new German nationalism and had learned much from German nationalists such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and even from radical völkisch authors like Paul de Lagarde.93 How was it possible that Zionism and the new German nationalism had so much in common and yet were deadly enemies? Here, the peculiarities of Zionist nationalism, as Weltsch understood it, come into play again. According to Weltsch, Zionism overcame the liberal worldview but reinvented one of its main ingredients, the idea of humanity, in a new and uncorrupted form. The new German nationalism, in contrast, retained a purely negative attitude toward liberalism and the Enlightenment. This is what separated Jewish and German nationalism as well as good and bad Zionism. “It is a vital question for every nationalism,” wrote Weltsch, “whether it finds the way to the idea of humanity. The question decides if this nationalism is a creative and spiritual or a destructive and demonic force.” 94 Although he considered the ideological foundation of völkisch nationalism to be both legitimate and significant for his own Zionist ideas, he was convinced that völkisch nationalists drew dangerous political conclusions from it. Weltsch derived this distinction to a large degree from his observation of German nationalism. His peculiar version of Zionism should thus be understood as a result of the specific context provided by German nationalist ideology and politics. In the last year of the Weimar Republic, Weltsch intensified his reporting about and commenting on the political developments in
[101] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[102] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Germany. He was particularly occupied with the rise of National Socialism and the dangers it posed for Jews.95 His principal attitude toward nationalism, however, remained unchanged. Until the end of the Weimar Republic, Weltsch did not identify himself with either a liberal or a völkisch concept of the nation. In fact, he affirmed and criticized both sides. This also means that he did not dismiss “ethnic” nationalism in favor of “civic” nationalism.96 Weltsch retained an ethnic vision of nationalism that was clearly molded by völkisch and illiberal intellectual traditions. He criticized liberalism for not producing real community— which was to be based on blood ties—and he sympathized with the radical nationalist ideology endorsed by neo-conservative groups. However, Weltsch also vehemently rejected the political form that nationalism had assumed in most cases, and to some extent even in the case of Zionism. He disapproved of the exclusive and violent tendencies he observed among the nationalist movements all around him. In order to contain these tendencies while maintaining the level of community and identity provided by völkisch nationalism, Weltsch re invented in his writing a central element of liberal and enlightened thought: humanity. According to this concept, however, humanity was no longer a cosmopolitan idea but was firmly anchored in community and national identity. In a post-liberal world, it was a means to overcome liberalism and rationalism and to achieve a deeper sense of identity without succumbing to national chauvinism. This was exactly the mission of Zionism. In Weltsch’s concept of nationalism, völkisch identity and universal humanity had to be reconciled. Weltsch’s confrontation with German nationalism reinforced both his critique of chauvinism and his affirmation of völkisch identity. During the Weimar years, when he was increasingly exposed to radical nationalist politics in Germany, he also increasingly emphasized the differences between Zionism and German nationalism. At the same time, he held onto his conviction that nationalism was to replace liberal ideology among both Jews and gentiles. In fact, affirmation of the metaphysical concept of the nation, which was deeply rooted in German völkisch traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provided the paradoxical basis for Weltsch’s rejection of chauvinist nationalism. For him, nationalism was a way to realize one’s being part of an organic and eternal community, not to accumulate political power through the means of a nation-state.97 Thus, rather than replace the ethnic concept of the Jewish nation with a civic one, Weltsch intended to dissociate the cultural and metaphysical from the political dimension of nationalism. Zionism should revolutionize Jewish life by overcoming liberalism, individualism, and assimilation,
but it should not engage in a power struggle with other national movements. On this basis, he hoped to preserve the level of national community promised by völkisch nationalism without sharing its chauvinistic consequences. Weltsch realized, of course, that in Germany it was precisely the illiberal and völkisch nationalist ideology he affirmed that served as the basis for the aggressive, chauvinist, and antisemitic nationalist politics he abhorred. He was not the only German intellectual at the end of the Weimar Republic who hoped that these two sides were not necessarily intertwined.98 In Germany, such hopes were soon to be brutally dashed. Yet even in Palestine it became increasingly clear that a nationalist movement could not confine itself to cultural renewal but inevitably had to confront the question of political power in the territory it claimed as its homeland. Weltsch’s attempt to develop a version of Zionism that fulfilled the cultural aspirations of völkisch nationalism but avoided its political consequences was an attempt to square the circle. He was thus not able to provide a realistic alternative to the political strategy of the Yishuv and the majority of the Zionist movement. Weltsch’s Zionism remained an unresolved contradiction, an anti-nationalist nationalism.
Notes Research for this article was made possible by grants generously provided by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. I am grateful to New York University’s Department for Hebrew and Judaic Studies, especially to Marion Kaplan for inviting me to be a Visiting Scholar during my research in New York, and to Ron Zweig for giving me the opportunity to present an early version of this article in his workshop on Israel Studies. I also wish to thank Mark Gelber, Francis Nicosia, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All translations from foreign-language sources are mine. 1 Robert Weltsch, “Politische Neujahrsbetrachtung,” Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 26, 1924. 2 See, e.g., Steven Aschheim, “Bildung in Palestine: Zionism, Binationalism, and the Strains of German-Jewish Humanism,” in his Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Oxford, 2007), 6–44; Yfaat Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 11, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 93–117; and Dimitry Shumsky, “On Ethnocentrism and Its Limits: Czecho-German Jewry in
[103] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[104] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Fin-de-Siècle Prague and the Origins of Zionist Binationalism,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 5 (2006): 173–88. 3 The German term “völkisch” is only very inadequately translated as “ethnic” or any other English term. George Mosse has therefore suggested using the anglicized version “Volkish,” meaning “pertaining to the ‘Volk.’” Mosse adds that “‘Volk’ is a far more comprehensive term than ‘people,’ for to German thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century ‘Volk’ signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental ‘essence.’” See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964), 4. Following Mosse, I use the term “völkisch nationalism” here to designate a specific variant of ethnic nationalism that refers to the “Volk” as a primordial entity that both proceeds historically and exceeds in its significance any political or social association. In this concept, “Volk” is not necessarily a racial category but rather an amalgam of cultural and biological ideas. The term “blood,” too, is used in this context as a metaphor for both cultural and biological kinship. This völkisch version of nationalism was by no means an exclusive feature of the völkisch organizations such as the Alldeutsche Verband or, later, the National Socialists. Instead, it was widespread among the right-wing and liberal parts of the political spectrum and even penetrated into socialist discourses. Völkisch concepts of the nation could therefore be found in non-radical nationalist discourses, too. Uwe Puschner’s insistence on a “narrow” definition of the term “völkisch” tends to obscure the pervasiveness of a primordial concept of “Volk” in the ideological debates in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. See Uwe Puschner, “Völkisch: Plädoyer für einen ‘engen’ Begriff,” in Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen: Völkische und nationalkonservative Erwachsenen bildung in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Paul Ciupke, Klaus Heuer, FranzJosef Jelich, and Justus H. Ulbricht (Essen, 2007), 53–66, and, more generally, idem, Die völkischen Bewegungen im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache—Rasse—Religion (Darmstadt, 2001). 4 See, e.g., the first lecture he gave to the Bar Kochba student organization in Prague in 1909: Martin Buber, “Das Judentum und die Juden,” in his Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden (1911; Cologne, 1963), 9–18. 5 Robert Weltsch, “Theodor Herzl und wir,” in Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag (Leipzig, 1914), 158. 6 George L. Mosse, “The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry,” in Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute, ed. Max Kreutzberger (New York, 1967), 81–114. 7 Stephen M. Poppel, Zionism in Germany, 1897–1933: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity (Philadelphia, 1977); Yehuda Eloni, Zionismus in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis 1914 (Gerlingen, 1987); Hagit Lavsky, Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism (Detroit, 1996).
8 See, e.g., Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1975), and Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge, La., 1980). 9 See, e.g., and in addition to the literature cited above, Arnold Paucker, Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen den Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik, 2nd ed. (Hamburg, 1969); Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York, 1972); and Sanford Ragins, Jewish Responses to anti-Semitism in Germany, 1870–1914: A Study in the History of Ideas (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1980). The most comprehensive and up-to-date study of the Central verein is Avraham Barkai, “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.) 1893–1938 (Munich, 2002). 10 See, e.g., Derek Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlements in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington, Ind., 1991); John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-deSiècle Europe (New Haven, Conn., 1994); Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, 2000); Mark H. Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen, 2000); Dafna Hirsch, “‘ ’Anu mefitsim ka’n tarbut’: Chinnukh le-higyenah ba-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el bi-tekufat ha-mandat ha-britti” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2000); Raphael Falk, Tsiyyonut veha-biyyologyah shel ha-Yehudim (Tel Aviv, 2006); and Rakefet Zalashik, “Hitpattechut ha-psikhi’atriyyah be-Palestinah uve-Yisra’el, 1892–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2006). Two important forerunners were Joachim Doron and Moshe Zimmermann. See Joachim Doron, “Ha-tsiyyonut ha-merkaz ’eiroppit mul ’ide’ologyot germaniyyot bein ha-shanim 1885–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1977); idem, “Rassenbewusstsein und naturwissenschaftliches Denken im deutschen Zionismus während der Wilhelminischen Ära,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 9 (1980): 389–427; Moshe Zimmermann, “Hashpa‘at ha-le’ummiyyut ha-germanit ‘al ha- le’ummiyyut ha-yehudit: Irgunei ha-studentim va-yehudiyyim be-Germaniyah bere’shit ha-me’ah ha-‘esrim,” Zion 45 (1980): 299–326; and idem, “Jewish Nationalism and Zionism in German-Jewish Students’ Organisations,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27 (1982): 129–53. 11 See Zohar Maor, “Mistikah, yetsirah ve-shivah ’el ha-yachadut: ‘Chug Prag’ bi-techillat ha-me’ah ha-‘esrim” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005); Adi Gordon, “Politikah chadashah, tsivyon yashan: Arnold Zweig, Hans Kohn ve-dor milchemet ha-‘olam ha-rishonah shel yachadut merkaz Eiroppah” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008); Etan Bloom, “Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2008); and Dimitry Shumsky, Bein Prag li-Yerushalayim: Tsiyyonut Prag ve-ra‘yon ha-medinah hadu-le’ummit be-Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 2010). 12 See, e.g., Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991); Till van Rahden,
[105] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[106] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen, 2000); and Ulrich Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg: Kriegserfahrungen, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuentwürfe (Berlin, 2001). 13 There is no scholarly biography of Weltsch, but see Christian Wiese, “The Janus Face of Nationalism: The Ambivalence of Zionist Identity in Robert Weltsch and Hans Kohn,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 51 (2006): 103–30, and Anja Siegemund, “Kassandrarufer? Robert Weltsch—eine Stimme des Verständigungszionismus,” in Jüdischer Almanach 2001, ed. Anne Birkenhauer (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 108–26. 14 On Weltsch’s role as the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau and his influence within the Zionist movement, see Herbert A. Strauss, “Robert Weltsch und die Jüdische Rundschau,” in Berlin und der Prager Kreis, ed. Margarita Prazi and Hans Dieter Zimmermann (Würzburg, 1991), 31– 43. See also Weltsch’s own account: “Redakteur der Jüdischen Rundschau,” in his Die deutsche Judenfrage: Ein kritischer Rückblick (Königstein im Taunus, 1981), 83–93. 15 See especially Weltsch’s famous article “Tragt ihn mit Stolz, den gelben Fleck!” Jüdische Rundschau, Apr. 4, 1933, published as a response to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on Apr. 1. 16 On German-Jewish-Czech relations in Prague, see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, 2000); Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (New York, 1988); and Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861– 1914 (Princeton, 1981). Population figures are from the year 1900, according to Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 15. 17 On the early Hugo Bergmann, see Maor, “Mistikah,” 26–66; Scott Spector, “Another Zionism: Hugo Bergmann’s Circumscription of Spiritual Territory,” Journal of Contemporary History 34 (1999): 87–108; and Dimitry Shumsky, “Historiografiyah, le’ummiyyut ve-du-le’ummiyyut: Chechogermanit, tsiyyonei Prag u-mekorot ha-gishah ha-du-le’ummit shel Hugo Bergmann,” Zion 69 (2004): 45-80. Although much scholarly work has been devoted to Max Brod, Felix Weltsch has been almost ignored by historians. On Brod, see, e.g., Gaëlle Vassogne, Max Brod in Prag: Identität und Vermittlung (Tübingen, 2009); Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Max Brod im Kampf um das Judentum: Zum Leben und Werk eines deutsch-jüdischen Dichters aus Prag (Vienna, 1992); and Mark H. Gelber, “Max Brod’s Zionist Writings,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988): 437–48. On Felix Weltsch, see the rather apologetic biography by Carsten Schmidt, Kafkas fast unbekannter Freund: Leben und Werk von Felix Weltsch. Philosoph, Journalist und Zionist (Würzburg, 2010). See also Achim Jaeger, “‘Nichts Jüdisches wird uns fremd sein’: Zur Geschichte der Prager ‘Selbstwehr’ (1907–1938),” Aschkenas 15 (2005): 151–207. The most comprehensive study on Ahad Ha‘am is Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha‘am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, 1993).
18 A good example of this is the neo-Kantian philosopher Paul Natorp. See Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus: Die Geschichte einer philosophischen Schulgemeinschaft (Würzburg, 1994). 19 In recent years, “Prague Zionism” (and especially Bar Kochba) has received increasing scholarly attention. In addition to the works cited in n. 12 above, see Martin J. Wein, “Zionism in the Bohemian Lands before 1918,” Judaica Bohemiae 43 (2008): 121–38; Shumsky, “Historiografiyah”; Spector, Prague Territories, 135–59; and Jaeger, “‘Nichts Jüdisches wird uns fremd sein.’” 20 Buber, Das Judentum und die Juden, 13. 21 See, e.g., Moses Calvary, “Das neue Judentum und die schöpferische Phantasie,” in Verein jüdischer Hochschüler, Vom Judentum, 103–16. The initiative for the anthology came from Bar Kochba, but Buber was involved from the beginning. See Robert Weltsch to Martin Buber, May 6, 1912, in Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. and with an introduction by Grete Schaeder, vol. 1: 1897–1918 (Heidelberg, 1972), 304–5. 22 Buber, Das Judentum und die Juden, 21–22. On the relationship between ethno-particularism and universalism in Buber’s thinking, see Yfaat Weiss, “Identity and Essentialism: Race, Racism, and the Jews at the Fin de Siècle,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (Bloomington, Ind., 2006), 49–68; Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit, 1989); Laurence Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought: Alienation and the Quest for Meaning (New York, 1989); and Bernard Susser, Existence and Utopia: The Social and Political Thought of Martin Buber (East Brunswick, N.J., 1981). For an interpretation emphasizing the universalistic and humanistic elements in Buber’s thinking, see Grete Schaeder, Martin Buber: Hebräischer Humanismus (Göttingen, 1966). 23 See Hugo Bergmann, “Die zionistische Kulturarbeit im Westen,” in his Jawne und Jerusalem: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1915), 15, and idem, “Einleitung,” in his Worte Mosis (Minden, 1913), 23–24. 24 Hans Kohn, “Geleitwort,” in Verein jüdischer Hochschüler, Vom Judentum, viii. Even though Max Brod and Felix Weltsch published their Zionismus als Weltanschauung only in 1925, in which they famously claimed that Zionism was in fact supra-nationalist humanism, traces of these ideas could already be found in their pre-war writings. See, e.g., Max Brod, “Der jüdische Dichter deutscher Zunge,” in Verein jüdischer Hochschüler, Vom Judentum, 261–63. For the later version, see Max Brod and Felix Weltsch, Zionismus und Weltanschauung (Mährisch-Ostrau, 1925). 25 Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag, “Bericht über die Tätigkeit im Sommersemester 1912, erstattet in der Generalversamm lung am 19. Oktober 1912 vom Obmann Jur. Robert Weltsch,” Leo Baeck Institute (hereafter LBI), New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/1/11. The lecture was published in an abridged version as
[107] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[108] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Robert Weltsch, “Zum Fichte-Jubiläum,” Die Welt, June 7, 1912, pp. 690– 91; quotations in the text below are from this version. 26 On the reception of Fichte’s philosophy by the cultural Zionists, see Manfred Voigts, “Wir sollen alle kleine Fichtes werden!” Johann Gottlieb Fichte als Prophet der Kultur-Zionisten (Berlin, 2003). 27 Hugo Bergmann to Martin Buber, May 11, 1915, in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1: 389. See also Hugo Bergmann, “J. G. Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation,” Jerubbaal 1 (1918–19): 38–40, and Bergmann, Worte Mosis. 28 Nachum Goldmann, Von der weltkulturellen Bedeutung und Aufgabe des Judentums (Munich, 1916), 36. 29 Weltsch, “Zum Fichte-Jubiläum,” 691. 30 Ibid. See also Robert Weltsch, “1813,” Jüdische Rundschau, Mar. 21, 1913. 31 Weltsch, “Zum Fichte-Jubiläum,” 690. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 691. 34 Ibid. 35 Robert Weltsch, “Weltbürgertum und Nationalismus,” LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/4/8. The manuscript bears no formal title, but “Weltbürgertum und Nationalismus” is underlined on the first page. 36 Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates (Munich, 1908). 37 Weltsch, “Weltbürgertum und Nationalismus,” 17. 38 Martin Buber, “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum,” in his Vom Geist des Judentums: Reden und Geleitworte (Leipzig, 1916), 9. On Buber’s relationship to Herder and German Romanticism, see Manuel Duarte de Oliveira, “Passion for Land and Volk: Martin Buber and Neo- Romanticism,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 41 (1996): 239–60; Avraham Shapira, “Buber’s Attachment to Herder and German Volkism,” Studies in Zionism 14 (1993): 1–30; Gilya Gerda Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897–1909 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1995); Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought, 43– 70; and Bernard Susser, “Ideological Multivalence: Martin Buber and the German Volkish Tradition,” Political Theory 5 (1977): 75–96. 39 A vast literature exists on neo-Romanticism and cultural criticism in fin-de-siècle Germany. See, e.g., Barbara Besslich, Wege in den “Kulturkrieg”: Zivilisationskritik in Deutschland 1890–1940 (Darmstadt, 2000); Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology; and Klaus Vondung, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich, 1988). 40 Martin Buber, “Zarathustra: Meinen zukünftigen Freunden” (ca. 1900), in Jewish National and University Library (JNUL) Jerusalem, Martin Buber Archives, Var 350/7 b, 5. See also idem, “Ein Wort über Nietzsche und die Lebenswerte,” Die Kunst im Leben 1 (1900), no. 2, in JNUL Jerusalem, Martin Buber Archives, Var 350/1251, 13. On Buber’s enthusiasm for Nietzsche, see Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue, 49–82; Jacob Golomb, Nietzsche and Zion (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004), 159–88;
Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Zarathustra’s Apostle: Martin Buber and the Jewish Renaissance,” in Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, ed. Jacob Golomb (London, 1997), 233–43; and Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought, 25–31. To be sure, Buber’s youthful enthusiasm for Nietzsche was soon replaced by a more critical view, but Nietzschean ideas also influenced his later philosophy. 41 See, e.g., Ernst Müller, “Gedanken über Nietzsche und sein Verhältnis zu den Juden,” Die Welt, Oct. 5, 1900; Arthur Ruppin, “Moderne Weltanschauung und Nietzsche’sche Philosophie,” Die Gegenwart 63, no. 10 (1903): 147–49; Gustav Witkowsky, “Nietzsches Stellung zum Zionismus,” Jüdische Rundschau, May 2, 1913; and Hans Kohn, “Nationalismus,” Der Jude 6 (1921–22): 674–86. On Nietzsche’s influence on German Zionists, see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, 1992), 102–7; Bruce E. Ellerin, “Nietzsche among the Zionists” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1990), 258–86, 300–308; and Golomb, Nietzsche and Zion, 21–64. 42 Buber, “Ein Wort über Nietzsche.” On the influence of Lebensphilosophie on Buber, see Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought, 85–88. 43 Hans Kohn, “Der Zionismus und die Religion,” in Zionistische Briefe: Herausgegeben vom Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag, 7 (May 1912) and 8–9 (June 1912), in LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/1/16. See also Siegmund Katznelson, “Weltanschauung und Partei,” in Zionistische Briefe: Herausgegeben vom Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag, Mar. 1911, 6–10, in CZA Jerusalem, Leo Hermann Collection, A 145/257; Kurt M. Singer, “Von der Sendung des Judentums: Ideen zur Philosophie Henri Bergsons,” in Verein jüdischer Hochschüler, Vom Judentum, 71–100; Hans Kohn, “Über den Begriff der ‘Erneuerung’ des Judentums und unsere Gegenwart,” manuscript of a talk given to the Bar Kochba student organization, June 15, 1912, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/1/16, with many quotations from Eucken; and Hans Kohn’s diary 1912–14, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/6/28, with excerpts of Simmel’s study on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and of an article by Richard Konen on Henri Bergson. On the influence of Lebensphilosophie on German-speaking Zionism, see Yotam Hotam, Moderne Gnosis und Zionismus: Kulturkrise, Lebensphilosophie und nationaljüdisches Denken (Göttingen, 2009), 117–237; Jörg Hackeschmidt, Von Kurt Blumenfeld zu Norbert Elias: Die Erfindung einer jüdischen Nation (Hamburg, 1997), 78–89; and Mosse, “Influence of the Volkish Idea.” 44 Weltsch, “Weltbürgertum und Nationalismus,” 3. See also Robert Weltsch, “Gelegentlich einer Rassentheorie,” Die Welt, Mar. 21, 1913, p. 366. 45 Weltsch, “Weltbürgertum und Nationalismus,” 12. Romanticism as an alternative to the Enlightenment also appealed to the young Zionists in Germany. See, e.g., Maarabi [pseud. of Kurt Blumenfeld], “Judentum und Rationalismus,” Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 9, 1915.
[109] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[110] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
46 For the formative influence of the Habsburg and particularly of the Bohemian situation on the Zionism of the Bar Kochba circle, see Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 93–152, and Shumsky, Bein Prag li-Yerushalayim, 81– 133. Kieval’s and Shumsky’s interpretations are, however, diametrically opposed. Whereas Kieval sees Bar Kochba as withdrawing from politics into intellectual Romanticism in the face of the national conflict in Bohemia, Shumsky more convincingly argues that the circle tried to develop a political strategy to overcome this conflict. 47 Heinrich Loewe, “Feinde ringsum!” Jüdische Rundschau, Aug. 7, 1914. 48 Martin Buber to Hans Kohn, Sept. 30, 1914, in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1: 370. See also Martin Buber to Elijahu Rappeport, Sept. 10, 1914, in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1: 370; Martin Buber, “Die Losung,” Der Jude 1 (1916–19): 1–3; and idem, “Die Tempelweihe: Rede, gehalten bei der Makkabäerfeier der Berliner Zionistischen Vereinigung am 19. Dezember 1914,” Jüdische Rundschau, Jan. 1, 1915. For the enthusiastic response of other Zionists to the war, see Hans Kohn to Martin Buber, Sept. 30, 1914, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/12; Diary of Hans Kohn, entry for Sept. 23, 1914 (transcript), LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/6/29; and Ludwig Strauss to Martin Buber, Sept. 30, 1914, in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1: 371–73. On Bar Kochba members’ initial reaction to the war, see Gordon, Politika chadasha, 71–75, and Maor, “Mistikah,” 153–62. For a good general analysis of the “Jewish August 1914,” see Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle, 53–68. For the Austrian case, see Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford, 2001), 39–58. 49 Robert Weltsch to Hugo Bergmann, May 11, 1915, in Robert Weltsch zum 60. Geburtstag: Ein Gedenkbuch gewidmet von Freunden (Tel Aviv, 1951), 5; Robert Weltsch to Martin Buber, July 18, Sept. 11, and Nov. 23, 1915, in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1: 392, 400, 404–5; Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Jan. 12, 1920, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/27. Other German and Austrian Zionists became increasingly disappointed by the war as well. See Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle, 87–95, and Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 166–69. 50 Robert Weltsch, “Österreichische Revolutionschronik,” Der Jude 3 (1918–19): 350–58. 51 Robert Weltsch, “Nationalismus und Sozialismus: Eine unpolitische Betrachtung über politische Gegenstände,” Der Jude 4 (1919–20): 193–99. 52 See, e.g., Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Jan. 12, 1920, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/27; Robert Weltsch, “Die Prager Konferenz,” Der Jude 5 (1920–21): 35–37; and Robert Weltsch to Georg Strauss, Jan. 31, 1921, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/1/58. On the socialist orientation of Weltsch and other Prague Zionists, see Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925–1933 (Leiden, 2002), 378–423. On Ha-Po‘el Ha-Tsa‘ir, see Shlomo Na’aman, Marxismus und Zionismus (Gerlingen,
1997), 157–252, and Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London, 1972), 270–337. 53 Weltsch, “Nationalismus und Sozialismus,” 196. 54 The article was dedicated to the recently assassinated Gustav Landauer, a close friend of Buber and a prominent proponent of ethical socialism. 55 See Stefan Vogt, Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie: Die sozialdemokratische Junge Rechte in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2006). 56 Weltsch, “Nationalismus und Sozialismus,” 196. 57 On the radical right in the early years of the Weimar republic, see Dirk Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933: Kampf um die Strasse und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg (Essen, 2001), 45–202; Jan Striesow, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Völkisch-Radikalen 1918– 1922, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1981); and Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes, 1919–1923 (Hamburg, 1970). 58 On the pervasiveness of nationalism across the Weimar political spectrum, see Vogt, Nationaler Sozialismus; Eric Kurlander, The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 (New York, 2006); Reinhard Richter, Nationales Denken im Katholizismus der Weimarer Republik (Münster, 2000); and Jürgen C. Hess, “Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein”: Demokratischer Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik am Beispiel der Deutschen Demokratischen Partei (Stuttgart, 1978). There is no comprehensive study of the national mobilization against the Ruhr occupation, but see Gerald D. Feldmann, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York, 1993), 631–97; Michael Ruck, Die Freien Gewerkschaften im Ruhrkampf 1923 (Cologne, 1986); and Hermann J. Rupieper, The Cuno Government and Reparations, 1922–1923: Politics and Economics (The Hague, 1979), 97–129. 59 On the antisemitic wave of 1923, see Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2003), 163–86, and Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 1999), 111–42, with emphasis on Bavaria. On the Scheunenviertel pogrom, see Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1918–1933 (Tübingen, 1986), 329–32. 60 “Die Schicksalsstunde des deutschen Judentums,” Jüdische Rundschau, Nov. 9, 1923. See also “Wie der Pogrom entstand,” Jüdische Rundschau, Nov. 9, 1923. 61 Robert Weltsch, “Die Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus,” Jüdische Rundschau, May 29, 1923. See also idem, “Zur Lage in Deutschland,” Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 28, 1923, and his earlier articles on this subject, “Die antisemitische Welle,” Jüdische Rundschau, July 11, 1919, and “Jagd auf Juden,” Jüdische Rundschau, Feb. 24, 1920. 62 Robert Weltsch, “Die judenfeindliche Welle in Deutschland,” Jüdische Rundschau, Nov. 20, 1923. See also Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Oct.
[111] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[112] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
18 and 19, 1923, LBI New York, Kohn-Weltsch Correspondence, AR 6908/2/3. 63 Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, June 29, 1923, LBI New York, KohnWeltsch Correspondence, AR 6908/1/4b. 64 On the riots of 1920 and 1921, see Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1919– 1929, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1991), 64–65, 89–109, and Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York, 2000), 127–44, 173–201. Numbers are according to Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 64, 103. The best analysis of the developments on the Arab side leading to the riots is still Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestine Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London, 1974). 65 The process of demobilization of the Jewish legion lasted until the immediate aftermath of the May 1921 riots, during which the few remaining members of the legion under the leadership of Eliezer Margolin participated in the defense of the Jaffa Jewish community. On the history of the Jewish legion, see Martin Watts, The Jewish Legion and the First World War (Basingstoke, 2004). 66 The background of the conflict between Jabotinsky and the Zionist Executive is discussed in Colin Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right (London, 2006), 21–48; Shmuel Katz, Jabo: Biyyografyah shel Ze’ev Jabotinski, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1993), 1: 431–544; and Joseph B. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman: The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story. The Early Years (New York, 1956), 367–435. Generally on Revisionist Zionism, see Yaakov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement (London, 1988); Joseph B. Schechtman and Yehuda Benari, History of the Revisionist Movement: Vol. 1, 1925–1930 (Tel Aviv, 1970). On Revisionist Zionism in Germany, see Francis R. Nicosia, “Revisionist Zionism in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31 (1986): 209–40, and 32 (1987): 231–67. 67 See Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York, 1992). 68 Robert Weltsch, “Der Prüfstein,” Jüdische Rundschau, Aug. 9, 1921. 69 Robert Weltsch to Martin Buber, Aug. 2, 1921, and Martin Buber to Robert Weltsch, Aug. 6, 1921, in Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 79–85; postcard from Martin Buber to Robert Weltsch, Aug. 18, 1921, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/1/20. Buber’s two addresses to the congress can be found in Buber, Der Jude und sein Judentum, 308–29, 467–75. The resolution, which was first drafted by Weltsch, was finally approved in a much attenuated version. For the draft resolution, see “Anträge zur Araberfrage,” Aug. 1921, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/1/20. For its final wording, see Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des XII: Zionistenkongresses in Karlsbad vom 1. bis 14. September 1921 (Berlin, 1922), 769. On Buber’s and Weltsch’s activities regarding the Karlsbad Conference, see Lavsky, Before Catastro-
phe, 151–61, and Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work: The Early Years, 1878–1923 (Detroit, 1988), 267–74. 70 On the role of Weltsch and the German Zionists in establishing Brit Shalom, see Hagit Lavsky, “German Zionists and the Emergence of Brit Shalom,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York, 1996), 648–70. Generally on Brit Shalom, see Adi Gordon, ed., “Berit shalom” veha-tsiyyonut ha-du-le’ummit: “Ha-she’elah ha‘arvit” ki-she’elah yehudit (Jerusalem, 2008); Shumsky, Bein Prag li-Yerushalayim; Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism”; and Ratzabi, Between Zionism. 71 Robert Weltsch, “Die Legion I” (1921), in Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch, Zionistische Politik: Eine Aufsatzreihe (Märisch-Ostrau, 1927), 256. 72 Ibid., 260. 73 Ibid., 260–61. See also Weltsch, “Der Prüfstein”; Robert Weltsch to Hugo Bergmann, Aug. 27, 1929, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/2/30. With the term “Stahlbad,” radical German nationalists referred euphemistically to the waves of bullets and shells that swept over the soldiers and glorified the war as the birthplace of the new, anti-liberal society and the new, heroic man. See, e.g., Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, 2nd ed. (Hamburg, 1932), 135, and idem, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin, 1922), 97. For the relevance of this term, see Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich, 1998), 104. 74 Robert Weltsch, “Rom und Jerusalem,” Jüdische Rundschau, Nov. 3, 1922. 75 Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Nov. 6, 1924, LBI New York, Kohn-Weltsch Correspondence, AR 6908/2/3; Heinrich Margulies, “Das neue Rom und Jerusalem,” Jüdische Rundschau, Dec. 9, 1924. Margulies was a prominent Austrian Zionist, editor of the Wiener Morgenzeitung and the author of Kritik des Zionismus (Vienna, 1919). He immigrated to Palestine in 1925 where he became the president of the Anglo Palestine Bank. 76 Robert Weltsch to Heinrich Margulies, Dec. 8, 1924, CZA Jerusalem, Heinrich Margulies Collection, A 392/8. See also Weltsch’s comments on the “fascist tendencies” of Walter Moses in his interview with Yehuda Eloni, April 1970, CZA Jerusalem, Robert Weltsch Collection, A167/52, 24. 77 Weltsch to Margulies, Dec. 8, 1924. 78 Robert Weltsch, “Die zionistische Bewegung” (1926), in Kohn and Weltsch, Zionistische Politik, 163, 158. 79 Robert Weltsch, “Was wir Buber danken,” Jüdische Rundschau, Feb. 7, 1928. See also Robert Weltsch, “Umschau: Religiöses Leben,” Der Jude 5 (1920–21): 537–43. 80 Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Nov. 9, 1922, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/27. See also Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Nov. 6, 1922, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/27.
[113] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
[114] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
81 Robert Weltsch, “Unser Nationalismus: Eine Chanukka-Betrachtung,” Jüdische Rundschau, Dec. 11, 1925. 82 Ibid. On the “Kriegervereine,” see Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der “kleinen Leute”: Die Kriegervereine im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871– 1914 (Munich, 1990), and Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York, 1990). 83 Weltsch, “Unser Nationalismus.” 84 On the 1929 riots, see Martin Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1928–35 (New York, 1993), 31–70; Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 220–38; and Segev, One Palestine, 314–27. 85 See Robert Weltsch to Felix Rosenblüth, Sept. 1, 1929, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/2/30; Chaim Weizmann to Kurt Blumenfeld, Nov. 13, 1929, and to Alfred Landsberg, Nov. 13, 1929, in The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, 25 vols., ed. Camillo Dresner (London, 1978), 14: 66–70; and Robert Weltsch to Chaim Weizmann, Dec. 3 and 12, 1929, quoted in Lavsky, Before Catastrophe, 216. The numbers of victims are from the British government report, quoted in Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 237. 86 Several such letters can be found in LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/2/16. 87 For a detailed account of the controversy around Weltsch within the German Zionist organization, see Lavsky, Before Catastrophe, 181–226. 88 Robert Weltsch, “Zum neuen Jahre,” Jüdische Rundschau, Oct. 4, 1929. 89 Ibid. See also Weltsch to Rosenblüth, Sept. 1, 1929, Robert Weltsch to Hugo Bergmann, Sept. 17, 1929, and Robert Weltsch to Felix Rosenblüth, May 22, 1930, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/2/30; and Robert Weltsch to Chaim Weizmann, July 13, 1930, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/2/18. 90 Robert Weltsch, “In der Zeit der Bedrängnis,” Jüdische Rundschau, Dec. 4, 1931. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. Weltsch specifically mentioned the journals Die Tat, edited by Hans Zehrer, Der Ring, edited by Heinrich von Gleichen, and Deutsches Volkstum, edited by Wilhelm Stapel. See also Robert Weltsch, “Aus dem nationalsozialistischen Lager,” Jüdische Rundschau, Jan. 6, 1932; Robert Weltsch to G. Pauli, Feb. 15, 1932, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/2/20; and Robert Weltsch, “Politik und Terrorakte,” Jüdische Rundschau, Aug. 5, 1932. 93 On Paul de Lagarde, see Ulrich Sieg, Deutschlands Prophet: Paul de Lagarde und die Ursprünge des modernen Antisemitismus (Munich, 2007). 94 Weltsch, “In der Zeit der Bedrängnis.” 95 See Weltsch’s articles, published anonymously: “Zum Wahltag,” Jüdische Rundschau, Mar. 11, 1932; “Nach der Reichspräsidenten-Wahl,” Jüdische Rundschau, Mar. 15, 1932; “Hitler Reichskanzler?” Jüdische Rundschau, Aug. 12, 1932; “Zum neuen Jahr,” Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 30, 1932; “Zur Lage in Deutschland,” Jüdische Rundschau, Nov. 22, 1932; and
“Regierung Hitler,” Jüdische Rundschau, Jan. 31, 1933. See also Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Feb. 16, 1932, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/27; Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Feb. 23, Mar. 1, and Mar. 4, 1932, LBI New York, Hans Kohn Collection, AR 259/4/28; and Robert Weltsch to Hans Kohn, Mar. 6, 1932, LBI New York, KohnWeltsch Correspondence, AR 6908/1/2. 96 This distinction is based on the dichotomy developed by Weltsch’s friend Kohn in the 1930s and 1940s, and it informed much of the literature on nationalism from then on. See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York, 1944). In recent years, this dichotomy has been criticized by many scholars who argue that nationalism always contains civic and ethnic elements. For a good summary of this debate, see Brian Vick, “Language and Nation: National Identity and the Civic-Ethnic Typology,” in What Is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914, ed. Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (Oxford, 2006), 155–70. 97 See Robert Weltsch, “Wandlungen,” Jüdische Rundschau, Jan. 26, 1926; Robert Weltsch, “Zionistische Probleme,” Jüdische Rundschau, July 23, 1926; Robert Weltsch, “Ein sorgenvoller Kongress,” Jüdische Rundschau, June 26, 1931; and Robert Weltsch to Adolf Böhm, Aug. 5, 1930, LBI New York, Robert Weltsch Collection, AR 7185/1/18a. 98 Another example is the protestant theologian and religious socialist Paul Tillich. See Paul Tillich, Die sozialistische Entscheidung (Potsdam, 1933), and Vogt, Nationaler Sozialismus, 249–55.
[115] Robert Weltsch
•
Stefan Vogt
Ahron Marcus: Portrait of a Zionist Hasid Joshua Shanes A bstr act Ahron Marcus (1843–1916), a committed Hasid and an active player in the early Zionist movement until his withdrawal in late 1900, developed a form of Jewish identity and politics that combined his Hasidic piety with deep adoration for Theodor Herzl and political Zionism, precisely at the moment that Orthodoxy was closing its ranks against the Zionist movement. This article gathers a wide range of sources on Marcus, particularly his Zionist-supported newspaper and nearly two dozen surviving letters between Marcus and Herzl, to establish the history and development of this Zionist and to consider its implications for the history of Zionism and political Orthodoxy. I argue that Marcus’s attempt to link political Zionism with Hasidic Orthodoxy both theologically and politically—by uniting the Zionist Organization with major Hasidic leaders while remaining within traditional society—was an intriguing exploration of Jewish identity beyond the existing typologies of eastern European Jewry. Key words: Ahron Marcus, Orthodoxy, Zionism, Hasidism, Theodor Herzl, eastern European Jewry
I
n a private conversation at the First Zionist Congress, Max Nordau asked Mayer Ebner (1873–1955), a young delegate from Czernowitz, whom he considered to be the most important figure in the Zionist movement. When Ebner hesitated to answer, Nordau continued, “I do not want to disparage my friend Herzl but I consider Aaron [sic] Marcus the most important personality.” Nordau, recalled Ebner, was enchanted with the Polish Jew “in Kaftan and Kipah, untrimmed beard and peyoth” who spoke like a German professor. “This contrast in the exterior of Aaron Marcus made Nordau, the European-minded, the man of paradoxes, consider that he was an undiscovered genius.”1 Joshua Shanes, “Ahron Marcus: Portrait of a Zionist Hasid,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 16, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2010): 116–60
[117] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
Ahron Marcus, a drawing based on an undated photo but estimated to have been taken ca. 1888–90. Courtesy of his descendants Israel Zwi Marcus and Israel Sharir as well as the Mossad Harav Kook library in Jerusalem.
Ahron Marcus (1843–1916), a native of Hamburg and graduate of its Jewish gymnasium, left Germany as a young man to study among Hasidim in Moravia, Galicia, and possibly Hungary. He eventually settled in Podgórze, outside Kraków, where he became a committed Hasid of several courts (see portrait).2 Marcus is best known for his numerous works on the Hasidic world—some scholarly, some hagiographical—in which he attempted to apply the scientific training of his youth to his newfound faith.3 His two biographies—neither critical—focus overwhelmingly on his religious transformation and on his supposedly happy, if turbulent, life in eastern Europe.4 Both virtually ignore the fact that, in 1896, Marcus—an active supporter of the proto-Zionist Hibbat Zion for almost 20 years—was captivated after reading Der Judenstaat and became a devoted Hasid of a new “tsaddik,” Theodor Herzl. Despite Herzl’s secularism, Marcus—17 years Herzl’s senior—was convinced that the Zionist leader would lead the Jews out of exile. He promised to “deliver the Hasidic masses” to Herzl by winning over the leading tsaddikim, a prospect that both Herzl and Nordau took very seriously. He attended several Zionist
[118] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Congresses and, in 1898, launched a German-language newspaper, the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, which focused heavily on Zionist issues.5 This periodical has never before been systematically explored, nor does it yet appear in the contemporary sanctuary of the German- Jewish press, the Compact Memory website.6 Despite mastering numerous languages, Marcus remained most at home in his native German, in which he produced the bulk of his scholarly work as well as the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung. (Ironically, his zealous devotion to his adopted Hasidic lifestyle led him to avoid teaching any non-Jewish language to his own children, who later studied German in secret.)7 He deliberately avoided publishing in Hebrew, he said, for fear of antagonizing those Hasidim who disapproved of his secular studies.8 Marcus’s attempt to fashion a Zionist Hasidic identity is interesting in that it raises questions regarding the dominant assumption that these ideologies were incompatible. Contemporary scholarship takes for granted sharp ideological antipathy and political struggle between the Zionist movement and all but the most moderate of the Orthodox leadership. Aviezer Ravitzky, for example, begins his seminal study with the understanding that [The] Zionist movement has from its inception appeared to the Orthodox religious leadership as a threatening paradox. It seemed to be a modernist Jewish movement that sought to overthrow the traditional way of life and rebelled against the imperatives of the past. . . . The Zionist awakening was perceived by the rabbinic authorities as a secular human initiative, undertaken by heretics and freethinkers, which at the same time pretended to achieve goals traditionally associated with messianic hopes. . . . [As a result,] the majority of Orthodox leaders condemned Zionism from its very outset.9
Marcus’s determination to forge an identity inclusive of both ideologies by literally uniting the two camps suggests that such assumptions might be in need of modification. In this article, I make use of the widest range of sources on Marcus, seeking to establish the history and development of this Zionist and to consider how he reconciled his support for the secular movement with his religious piety. This little-known story sheds new light on the history of both religious Zionism and political Orthodoxy as well as on the process by which Orthodox-Zionist relations collapsed. To be sure, Marcus is not unknown among scholars. Scattered references to his Zionist activities—particularly his attempt to connect Herzl with David Moshe Friedmann, the Czortkower Rebbe (1828–1900)—appear in several sources.10 And Willy Aron, who personally knew Marcus’s sister, wrote
two very brief articles on Marcus over half a century ago.11 Nonetheless, an analysis of Marcus’s Zionist period—a subject richly documented in his newspaper and in other published and unpublished sources (including nearly two dozen surviving letters between Marcus and Herzl)12—remains a desideratum. Marcus fits uneasily into existing typologies of fin-de-siècle eastern European Jewry. He was a religious Zionist who pursued secular studies and yet remained within the Hasidic fold. While professing aspects of Zionist messianism, he remained a steadfast supporter of political Zionism and promoted Cyprus as a possible “temporary haven” for European Jews. Marcus aligned with none of the “three options regarding the issue of messianism and Zionism which presented themselves to Orthodox Jews at the turn of the century” outlined by Ravitzky: that Zionism constituted an anti-messianic heresy; that Zionism heralded and hastened the messianic redemption; or that Zionism had nothing to do with messianism.13 Thus, Marcus’s story elucidates not only the political negotiations between Vienna and Czortkow but also his personal attempt to navigate between these two worlds and forge his own Zionist and Orthodox (that is, modern Jewish) identity. This analysis of Marcus complements recent trends in Jewish historiography. Studies that separate traditional Jews from their “Orthodox” leadership have enabled us to consider how traditional Jews might have formed Jewish national identities while opposing formal Zionist affiliations.14 Marcus presents the fascinating case of an “Orthodox” leader who embraced not only Jewish nationalism generally but also secular Herzlian Zionism in particular, precisely at the time when his own community was closing its ranks against the Zionist menace. His reverence for the Zionist leader—whose letters he cherished “like a prayer book”15 —never replaced his adoration for the Hasidic tsaddikim, as it did for so many modernizing “ethnicists,” Jews raised traditionally for whom Zionism provided a secular but still Jewish identity.16 Nor did his Zionist activity ever cost him their support, as it did for other leading religious Zionist figures. Marcus remained firmly within the Hasidic world throughout his Zionist period, apparently never broadly rejected (or at least never ejected) for his Zionist proclivities.17 Marcus was no fringe figure. He was an elected delegate to three congresses and sat on the Zionist Organization’s (ZO) Greater Executive Committee, which directed the movement. He also corresponded frequently with Herzl, who, like Nordau, greatly respected him. In the Hasidic world, Marcus was close to several different courts and represented one of Galicia’s largest (Czortkow) in its negotiations with Herzl over its support of the ZO.
[119] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
Marcus’s Early Zionist Activity [120] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Ahron Marcus was the son of an observant if not particularly learned merchant whom he barely knew. His parents died when he was quite young, leaving him and his sister Miriam to be raised primarily by their grandmother.18 Some who have written about him describe him as a prodigy, able to read both Hebrew and German by age three, and familiar with over a thousand pages of Talmud by age nine, though Gershom Bader suggests this may be exaggerated.19 As an adolescent, Marcus grew interested in mathematics and languages, studying Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in addition to Hebrew and Aramaic. According to his sister, though others tell the story differently, at age 16 Marcus suffered a crisis of faith. Allegedly, a chance encounter with a Polish Hasid on a train led Marcus to join a yeshivah in Boskowitz, Moravia, where he remained for seven years. He then sent word to his sister that he had settled in Podgórze, outside Kraków, where he married into a well-connected Hasidic family.20 More convincing is the account of Marcus’s grandson, Markus Marcus. He writes that Ahron was inspired not by a random encounter with a Hasid but by a lecture of the visiting rabbi Baruch Isaac Lipschütz, whom he followed to his yeshivah in Boskowitz, where he stayed only briefly.21 When he discovered there the same religious strife that plagued Hamburg, Marcus grew interested in the Hasidim, whom he heard vilified by observant and liberal Jews alike. He chose to settle in Kraków because it boasted a strong Hasidic community but was also a city large enough that he hoped his thick German accent would not hinder his acceptance. As the capital of West Galicia, part of the Habsburg Monarchy, Kraków was home to many German speakers, including many Jews, who constituted about a quarter of the population. His grandson places him in Kraków by 1861, at age 18, and dates his marriage to 1863.22 Marcus first opened a store and later served as a clerk for a number of different firms. He was apparently first attached to the Radomsker Rebbe (Shlomo Rabinowitz) until the latter’s passing in 1866, another reason his grandson’s timeline is more compelling than those of other biographers. The rebbe reportedly encouraged him to continue his secular studies and even to translate Hasidic teachings into German.23 Following Rabinowitz’s passing, Marcus attached himself to R. Yosef Friedmann of Rymanow (d. 1913), among others.24 Marcus was an early and active supporter of Hibbat Zion. He claimed to be first inspired by a meeting with Rabbi Isaac Friedmann, a grandson of the Ruzhiner Rebbe and nephew of the Czortkower
Rebbe, in Kattowitz, Prussia, on September 4, 1882. Marcus returned to Kraków and, together with that city’s chief rabbi Simon Sofer (1820–83), head of the Orthodox political party Mahsike Hadas, established the Rosh Pina society to promote the settlement of Jews in Palestine.25 The group, founded on January 7, 1883, sought to raise this important issue among those Jews “whose love for their nation [le’um] has not yet been extinguished from their hearts.” 26 The society was named after the settlement Rosh Pina, for whose establishment Friedmann had claimed credit. Mahsike Hadas and its Hasidic patron Yehoshua Rokeach, the Belzer Rebbe, also generally lent its support for projects to settle the land of Israel during the 1880s.27 The group distinguished between the idea of settlement, which it supported, and the movement’s secular leadership. Even in these early years, Marcus exhibited a proclivity for following the direction of his Hasidic mentors in determining his own position on Zionist issues. Thus, he partially withdrew from the movement—along with many of its early rabbinical supporters—in the aftermath of the 1888–89 Shmita affair, which saw the sharpening of anti-Zionist attitudes among some traditionalist elements because of the colonists’ decision to farm their land during that biblically sanctioned “fallow” year. Several leading rabbinical authorities, including the well-known religious Zionist Samuel Mohilewer (1824–98) as well as Orthodox leaders who later opposed the Zionist movement, ruled that the land could be farmed only by indigent Jews or non-Jews and if sold temporarily to a non-Jew. Others, both in eastern Europe and particularly in the Ashkenazic community in Palestine, opposed this ruling vociferously. Revelations of impious behavior among settlers in Gederah also plagued traditionalist-secularist relations in the movement at that time.28 Here Marcus followed those Hasidic leaders who condemned the decision to work the land. Bader describes him as an “opponent of Yishuv Eretz Yisroel” from that point, but this is simply untrue.29 In 1892, Marcus helped to organize a lecture in Kraków by the leading Jewish nationalist in Austria, Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), who inspired him to lead the yearlong effort to establish a local branch of Birnbaum’s Zion society to settle Palestine and Syria. Marcus was elected president of the new association—later renamed Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el—at its founding meeting on April 27, 1893.30 He also contributed to the flagship Zionist newspaper in Austria, Birnbaum’s Selbst-Emancipation, writing a sharp critique of the Hirsch settlement in Argentina while praising Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s efforts in Palestine.31 Marcus even operated a business importing wine and spirits from Rothschild’s col-
[121] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[122] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
onies in Palestine,32 and later he set up his son Shlomo to market etrogim (citron) from Palestine as well. This was again in keeping with the position of his primary Hasidic mentor, David Moshe Friedmann, who continued to support agricultural settlements in Palestine during these last pre-Herzlian years.33 Marcus did, however, come out against Hibbat Zion during the affair surrounding Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s 1894 arrest in Palestine.34 When members of the old Yishuv in Jerusalem denounced Ben Yehuda to the Turkish authorities based on an article he published in Ha-tsevi, Galician Zionists held protest rallies against the Jerusalem “zealots,” whom Jacob Fuchs (editor of Ha-maggid He-chadash) described, among other epithets, as the misfortune of the Jewish people.35 Marcus came out in their defense and strongly attacked Fuchs—already an outspoken opponent of Marcus—for his comments.36 This affair and the broader controversies connected to it marked a further turning point in the history of religious-secular relations in pre-Herzlian Zionism. Thus, for example, most of those who supported the Shmita dispensation in 1888 no longer did so in 1895.37 Much of the remaining traditionalist support for Hibbat Zion eroded, and the movement’s ultra-Orthodox opponents grew emboldened and more militant in their attacks. The Galician ultra-Orthodox political party Mahsike Hadas, for instance, had until then expressed in its newspaper moderate support for settling the land of Israel, but it would no longer do so. It now argued that Zionist maskilim such as Ahad Ha‘am, coming from within traditional society, posed a greater danger than western-style religious reformers.38 That group’s patron, the Belzer Rebbe (Rokeach) had reversed himself in 1890, rescinding his previous support of Hibbat Zion.39 In contrast, Marcus followed the lead of his own rebbe (Friedmann) and did not abandon the movement at this point. At Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el’s November 1894 and December 1895 meetings, he was reelected to serve on the group’s board, though no longer as an officer.40 The appearance of Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in early 1896 reinvigorated Marcus’s commitment to Zionism, lending a new sense of purpose to his life. His mission for the next four years would be to prove Mahsike Hadas wrong while remaining—apparently accepted and even respected—within the Hasidic community. Marcus and Herzl The emergence of Herzl initially presented the possibility of overcoming the growing rift between secular Zionists and Orthodox leaders
because of his emphasis on practical action rather than culture and ideology.41 Herzl hoped to sidestep all religious questions in order to build a movement inclusive of both western and eastern Jews. He placed great stock in the potential of Orthodox support in eastern Europe. Like Moses Hess and other disillusioned “integrationists,”42 Herzl assumed that the eastern European religious masses—for all of their faults—constituted the most authentic Jews. He carefully avoided offending religious sensibilities at the congress, honoring rabbis by seating them with the Zionist officers on the dais. Like Nordau, Herzl particularly valued the potential utility of “the Hasid Ahron Marcus,” as he nearly always described him in his memoirs.43 Both Herzl and Nordau greatly overestimated the power and influence of rabbis over the eastern European Jewish masses, and the western-educated Marcus appeared to them as an obvious bridge to that world.44 Marcus certainly played into their ambitions for him. One of his surviving letters to Herzl, for example, promised to secure the support of three million Hasidic Jews along with the wealth of “many millionaires” by converting a few dozen influential tsaddikim to Zionism. The letter impressed Herzl enough that he refers to it in his diary.45 Marcus’s active participation in Hibbat Zion throughout the 1890s was reflected in his election as a delegate to the First Zionist Congress— the first of three he would attend—by both Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el in Kraków and ’Ahavat Tsiyyon in Tarnow.46 Little information is available about his presence there. Marcus did not speak on the record, which Yosef Salmon blames on his fear of the anti-religious atmosphere, though he indicates no source to support this.47 Similarly unsubstantiated is Willy Aron’s description of Marcus spending an entire night at the congress with Herzl discussing “problems pertaining to Palestine and the Jewish people.”48 The congress clearly strengthened Marcus’s resolve, evidenced in his decision the following February to launch the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, in which he spread an almost messianic aura around Herzl, fanned rumors of his diplomatic successes, and explained the greatness of his movement.49 Ehud Luz notes that the proliferation of Zionist preachers spreading this message in the aftermath of the First Zionist Congress greatly sharpened anti-Zionist Orthodox sentiment. “The sermons that endeavored to prove,” writes Luz, “through signs and wonders that the Zionist dream was near realization and the Redemption close at hand were one of the major factors contributing to the Orthodox antagonism to Zionism.”50 Yet this is precisely what Marcus was doing, from within Hasidic society, without any apparent sense of cognitive dissonance. Indeed, his conviction that Herzlian Zionism was
[123] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[124] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
completely compatible with Orthodox Judaism was set even before the First Zionist Congress, from the moment that he first read Der Judenstaat. The book had a powerful impact on Marcus. Der Judenstaat, as Marcus wrote to Herzl in 1896, “came like a lightning bolt in the darkness of night in both of the camps, assimilationists and Hasidim.”51 Like other religious Zionists, Marcus found strength rather than weakness in Herzl’s secular credentials, both because it indicated for him the return to Jewishness by a member of the secular camp and because such men were considered uniquely poised to influence the gentile nations in favor of Jewish national return. Hasidim, Marcus continued, were “completely beside themselves with astonishment that our ideals, our utopias, our hopes and aspirations, which over generations and millennia have become flesh and blood, were found worthy of recognition by men who in sagacity and sober judgment rival the leading statesmen of Europe.”52 Marcus was very much following the cue of his rebbe (Friedmann), whose response to Herzl’s secularism expressed a long-standing tradition of religious latitude given to community intercessors (shtadlanim) in eastern Europe: What do we care if those who endeavor [to influence] the Sultan are not observant? If we had a case before their courts, we would accept as our attorney a lawyer who is religiously unobservant but knows how to be an effective advocate. And so we Hasidim will strengthen the house to make yeshivot that will spread Torah and fear [of God], and they will engage with the outer world. 53
This position contradicted the stance of those Galician courts that, in the 1880s, supported the ruling of Mahsike Hadas forbidding work with irreligious leaders in defense of Jewish communal interests.54 It also opposed the vast majority of Polish Hasidic leaders, nearly all of whom were rallying against Herzl by November 1897.55 How exactly did Marcus understand Herzl’s secular text in light of his own religious predispositions? Marcus himself addressed this question in a public lecture delivered just after the book’s publication. On January 10, 1897, he delivered a speech to the Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el society of Kraków entitled, simply, Dr. Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat.56 Ironically, Marcus never actually discussed Herzl’s text itself in that talk. Instead, the lecture was intended to prove to his predominantly religious audience the compatibility of modern Zionism with, indeed its inseparability from, Orthodoxy. Although he eventually presented several rabbinic prooftexts toward this end, the
principal work cited at length throughout the lecture (block quotations constitute perhaps a quarter of the total material) was Moses Hess’s 1862 Rome and Jerusalem, the understanding of which he argued would enable Orthodox Jews to accept the Jewish national idea. “To understand Herzl properly,” he wrote, “one must read Hess”: You will therefore permit me to give various citations from this littleknown text in order to show how a secular Jew [Freidenker], standing at the highest level of modern culture, considers the development of Jewish conditions in 1862 from the perspective of the national principle [Nationalitätenprinzips] and the political regeneration of Jewry [staat lichen Regeneration des Judenthums], and thereby arrives at conclusions that the most Orthodox Jew can readily accept. 57
Marcus sought to depict Zionism as a natural outgrowth of Orthodoxy. Hess, a secular Jew who came to criticize Reform Judaism sharply for rejecting traditional Jewish notions of redemption, provided Marcus with an ideal source to prove his case. Marcus’s Zionist writings frequently emphasize the opposition of Reform Judaism to Zionism, with the obvious inference that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend. Hess proved useful in other areas as well. Like other Zionists in the 1890s, Marcus struggled to convince Jews that they constituted a modern nation. Like Hess, Marcus insisted in his native German tongue that it was not one’s language that determines nationality, as Austrian law by then declared, but rather one’s birth. “A nation is nothing other than an expanded concept of family,” he wrote, and, from this perspective, “the Jews are the nation par excellence.”58 Marcus eventually cited a wide range of rabbinic statements defending the settlement of Palestine, ranging from Avraham Slutski’s Shivat Tsiyyon 59 to the Romanian rabbi Isaac Friedmann, among the most important Hasidic leaders in Romania at the time. Marcus claimed to have personally served as translator at a meeting between Friedmann and a Zionist delegation attempting to win Friedmann’s support for the colonization of Palestine. Friedmann allegedly expressed his long-standing support for the idea, going back many decades, but said that he now feared the Turks would place too many obstacles for its continued viability unless the wealthy Jewish elite financed it more actively. By detailing Friedmann’s long-standing support for settling the land of Israel, as well as his very secular analysis of the project’s current prospects, Marcus presented Friedmann as possessing greater Zionist credentials and political acumen than those who approached him.
[125] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[126] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
This story does more for Marcus than prove the support of this scion of Hasidic aristocracy for settling Palestine. Friedmann had a stronger message to these Zionist representatives and to Marcus’s current audience: “But do not believe that a modern, Reform Jewish state [Reformjudenstaat] is possible. We have been sent into exile, as we have been told in the rebuke [tokhachah] to the earliest generation of our people, like a son who is misbehaving and is sent by his father to a correctional institution. Unimproved, we may not return. When you are prepared to participate in a regeneration on religious foundations, and can summon some of the necessary means, then you can count on our willing cooperation.” We have here the complete program of Herzl’s text! 60
This, then, is the crux of his entire argument. Herzl, says Marcus to his religious audience, has no intention of forming a secular state. His program was no different than that of the grandson of the Ruzhiner Rebbe, who sought national regeneration “on religious foundations.” Indeed, Herzl’s program was anticipated in its entirety by the rebbe. How was it possible for Marcus to make such an argument, considering that the entire text of Der Judenstaat, which he was supposedly explaining, argues precisely for a secular state? Certainly Herzl fed some of these expectations in his correspondence with Marcus.61 For example, on May 4, 1896, Herzl acknowledged what was clearly an adulatory letter from Marcus and conveyed particular gratitude for this Orthodox support. He recognized the special debt owed to “Orthodoxy” for its contribution to preserving the Jewish people. On May 8, Herzl again expressed how “highly welcome” the Hasidim were in the national movement. He recalled his promise from an earlier draft of Der Judenstaat to build in Palestine a “beautiful Sadagora”—that is, a replica of the lavish Hasidic court then struggling for its existence. Herzl expressed his respect for “every form” of Judaism and hoped Marcus could serve as a connection between himself and the rebbe, for whom he enclosed a copy of his book.62 Herzl also cultivated Marcus’s personal adoration. Herzl consistently expressed his great friendship, admiration, and loyalty for Marcus, words that clearly fostered similar feelings in their recipient. “I must tell you,” Herzl wrote, for example, in 1897, “how deeply your dear letter touched me. Just believe me always, that you do not give your friendship to an unworthy one.” This friendship, he continued, had led him to grow “eager to learn about Hasidism,” and he asked
Marcus to lead him on a discovery tour of the Hasidic world as soon as the work of the First Congress was behind them.63 Undoubtedly, these intimations excited Marcus and convinced him of Herzl’s sincere love and respect for his beloved Hasidic community. Marcus emphasized these passages in presenting Herzl’s agenda. Yet Herzl never downplayed his opposition to establishing a theocracy in the future state, something he repeated in his letters to Marcus and certainly in his published writings.64 He welcomed the input of the rebbe, for example, but wrote in no uncertain terms: “Only this must remain without a doubt, that we will not establish a theocracy.”65 On May 4, Herzl expressed his support for total religious freedom in the future Jewish state. “Everyone will worship Gd [sic] in his own way.”66 While assuring Marcus and his potential Hasidic supporters that they would not be pressured to abandon their way of life, he declared quite explicitly his intention to avoid any religious strife. “I am for absolute freedom of belief; everyone should be able to believe or not believe as he wishes.”67 Marcus similarly seemed to read Herzl selectively on the issue of the role of rabbinic leadership in the Zionist movement. Marcus was a vigorous advocate for Orthodox supervision of religious life in the new colonies, something that Herzl strongly opposed. His frequent reports on the miserable state of the Hirsch settlements in Argentina blamed their misfortune primarily on the lack of religious structure there.68 Moreover, he assumed that future settlements in Palestine (“in strict contrast to the methods followed in America”) would be strictly observant. Calling religion “the lifeblood of the Jewish nation,” Marcus declared that the “fullest piety” would be maintained in the colonies, thereby allaying local fears against the new settlers.69 Nevertheless, his adoration for Herzl prompted him to overlook this incongruity, even after the explosion of the Kulturkampf—and Herzl’s call to “conquer the communities”—at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 (which I discuss further below). Marcus continued to praise Herzl unreservedly in the pages of the Krakauer Jüdischer Zeitung. He did so even as he defended religious Zionism’s call for the immediate settlement of Palestine and religious supervision of the new settlements, both of which Herzl obviously opposed. Although Marcus sharply attacked Nordau for his portrayal of eastern European Jews as degenerate, he never suspected Herzl of harboring such ideas. On the contrary, he praised the leader as being too smart to fall for anti-Hasidic propaganda and too appreciative of the contributions of Hasidism to the Jewish nation. As proof, he quotes Herzl’s letter of appreciation for Marcus’s first major work on
[127] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[128] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Hasidism (Hartmanns inductive Philosphie im Chassidismus), in which Herzl praises Marcus for enlightening the German reader about Hasidic spiritual life.70 Marcus presents the praise at face value, rather than as the platitudes of approbation that they surely were. Marcus’s campaign on behalf of political Zionism reflected his broader attachment to Herzl himself. For example, Marcus strongly promoted the Jewish Colonial Trust from the moment of its incorporation in early 1899. The bank was a major source of resentment by traditionalists against the Zionist Organization following the Second Congress. Conditions they sought to place on its funding of settlements were all rejected.71 Nevertheless, Marcus’s newspaper repeatedly included full-page advertisements for the bank. He also integrated the topic into articles on other subjects. For example, the following month Marcus analyzed the history of the Dreyfus Affair. The lead article concluded in proper Zionist fashion: “Buy shares of the Jewish National Bank!” 72 Marcus lauded Herzl’s fight against “assimilationist pseudo-Semites” who denounced the bank as utopian, and he extolled the Jewish workers whose small contributions would make it possible. Critically, Marcus praised Herzl for turning to the masses, “the real masses, not the half-Jews in the West,” but noted that they were not yet ready. They were waiting for assurances that their religious principles would be protected.73 Written in May 1899, the passage is indicative of Marcus’s growing frustration at the rising influence of cultural Zionists in the movement, though he still clearly viewed Herzl as an ally in this struggle. This loyalty to Herzl was not anomalous among religious Zionists or even some non-Zionists.74 Marcus, however, seems to have transposed in many ways the concept of the tsaddik onto Herzl, who thereby became a semi-divine figure who could do no wrong. Certainly, Marcus’s biography suggests a pattern of cleaving closely to the thinking of powerful, charismatic figures, and he may have adopted Herzl as such a mentor. His responses to Herzl extended well beyond support for political Zionism. In his May 6, 1896, correspondence, for example, Marcus described himself kissing Herzl’s previous letter “as though it were a prayer book.” Herzl’s unpublished notes about Marcus, preserved by Saul Raphael Landau and published in Hebrew translation by Chaim Bloch, suggest similar adulation. “The Hasid Ahron Marcus,” he wrote, “is comparing the Congress in Basel to a tall building from which its guard Herzl sees far into the distance, into the future of our people.” 75 “From Kolomea,” he wrote elsewhere, “a letter from the Hasid Ahron Marcus said: The wisdom of God is with Dr. Herzl.” 76
Responding to Orthodox Critics Marcus often described Zionism as being preferable to assimilation or Reform Judaism, which in his mind would be the dominant trend of western Jews but for the Zionist movement.77 In order to overcome the discrepancy between his own support for Zionism as the solution to religious disaffection and Herzl’s obvious secular vision and lifestyle, Marcus—like most of Herzl’s traditionalist supporters—frequently latched onto Herzl’s famous statement at the First Zionist Congress: “Zionism is a return to Jewishness [Judenthum] even before there is a return to the Jewish land.” 78 Covering news of the Second Zionist Congress, for example, Marcus distinguished not simply between political and cultural Zionism (the latter receiving extensive analysis and the expected rebuke) but also between Nordau’s “pure political Zionism”—which he critiques as devoid of concern for Jewish religious conditions—and Herzl’s Zionism, “with the program of return to Jewishness.” 79 As Shmuel Almog has noted, Judenthum signifies both Jews as a collective body (that is, Jewry) and Judaism as a religion. With this turn of phrase, Herzl deliberately obfuscated the inherent contradiction between Orthodoxy and his own “conde scending” attitude toward religion.80 No doubt largely because of such careful rhetoric, religious Zionists generally gave Herzl a pass when it came to his secular lifestyle, even as they lambasted other secular leaders.81 Marcus, however, went much farther. In responding to religious critics of Zionism, a common topic in the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Marcus bluntly put forth an argument that—when published more famously by the Kiev Zionist leader Max Mandelstamm a year later—would unite ultra-Orthodox forces against Zionism as nothing before had. A religiously unobservant Zionist, he wrote, was a better Jew than an observant anti-Zionist.82 On March 29, 1898, for example, Marcus wrote in response to one such critic: “Despite his Orthodoxy, Herzl is in this regard a better Jew than he.” 83 As prooftext he cited the Passover Haggadah, in which the evil son is characterized this way by virtue of his separating himself from the community. In other words, the anti-Zionist critic—the evil son—was undermining Jewish unity whereas the irreligious Herzl led a crusade on behalf of the primary commandment of the Torah, supporting Klal Yisra’el. “He who denies the national principle in Judaism,” wrote Marcus, “is no Jew.”84 That a committed Hasid should make this argument, in language as sharp and halakhically problematic as Mandelstamm’s, is astounding. No one could argue that Marcus lacked familiarity with the relevant halakhic material.85
[129] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[130] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Marcus rarely acknowledged the existence of specifically Hasidic opposition to Zionism, dismissing it on one occasion as an “honorable” position based on a misconception.86 Instead, most of his articles addressing rabbinic opposition focused on western rabbis, particularly Reform though also neo-Orthodox. Marcus ridiculed both the religious grounds on which they opposed the Zionist movement and, in the case of Reform rabbis, their right even to raise religious issues in light of their own supposed lack of religious observance and education. In his July 13, 1898, lead article, for example, Marcus defended Zionism against the charge that it contradicts Jewish messianic hopes: [The Zionist detractors declare:] The strivings of the so-called Zionists to found a Jewish-national state in Palestine contradicts the messianic promises of Judaism as contained in the holy book and later religious sources. This is argued by the same men who for decades have struck the words Zion and Jerusalem, the prayer for the return to the holy land, from their prayer books. People from whose mouths one could hear countless times that the messianic hope is an illusion, that all messianism became obsolete and superfluous with the 1848 emancipation.87
Finally, enraged that men who had “thrown off the yoke of mitzvot” would dare to raise halakhic objections to Zionism, he asks sardonically of his Reform detractors, “Who among them can even read a page of Talmud?” 88 Marcus did more to respond to religious attacks on Zionism than simply discredit their proponents. Like Mahsike Hadas before its transformation in the mid-1890s, Marcus distinguished between Zionist theory and its current leadership. “Does Zionism contradict religion in its principles (this has nothing to do with its practitioners and their beliefs but rather solely with the theory) or not?”89 That Zionism did not contradict Judaism, he answered, is proved by the fact that “recognized authorities” like Rabbi Samuel Mohilewer supported the principle, which they never would have done had it run counter to halakhah. As further proof, he cited R. Yom Tov Lipman Heller (1579–1654), who wrote that the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem would begin before the messianic restoration of Jewish sovereignty: The eternalized [verewigte] Rabbi Samuel Mohilewer, may his righteous memory be a blessing, therefore forged the only correct path for a rabbi, who has not only a healthy human understanding but also a youthful warm Jewish heart for his people, for his history, for his Torah, and for his service to his God, when he sacrificed his fortune (40,000 rubles), [to contribute] according to his abilities toward the rebuilding of the Temple,
even if only to schlep one stone, in keeping with the [talmudic] saying “Kol she-lo’ nivne beit ha-mikdash be-yamav ke-’illu nechrav be-yamav” [Anyone for whom the Temple is not rebuilt in his days, it is as if it was destroyed in his days]. He did the incredible service of winning over Baron Rothschild for settling the land of Israel (the mitzvah which, according to Nahmanides in Parashat ’Acharei, is the greatest of all mitzvot).90
When Armand Kaminka (1866–1950), one of Herzl’s earliest rabbinic supporters, turned sharply against Herzl in 1898 over his opposition to practical Zionism (that is, the immediate colonization of Palestine), Kaminka looked to Marcus to support his countermovement. Kaminka argued that Herzl’s secularism forbade cooperation with him. In response, Marcus insisted that he would certainly not oppose Zionism because of the secularism of its leaders. On May 8, he spoke at a meeting of Galician Zionists whose unanimous resolution condemned Kaminka for his attempt to form a competing Zionist congress. Ten days later, Marcus penned a personal rebuke to Kaminka in which he belittled the rabbi’s significance and hailed Herzl as an instrument of God that rose above all Jewish divisions: Political Zionism can become a tool in the hand of God before we make mistakes. . . . Nordau and Herzl will be representatives of our nation despite all of our religious hesitations, on the same level as Cremieux and Disraeli. Be wary of Dr. Herzl! He stands above all the parties and symbolizes a very precious idea, while your work deals only with ritual matters [kultusfach].91
Adding insult to injury, Marcus sent a copy of Kaminka’s solicitation and his reply to Herzl as well. Herzl responded with brotherly solidarity against that “perfidious priest” whom he called “Zionism’s first traitor.” 92 For Marcus, supporting Zionism was not merely a temporal solution to Jewish suffering in Europe. Mohilewer’s famous parable of Europe as a house on fire, used to counter criticisms of his working together with secular Jews, was not Marcus’s dominant paradigm.93 Marcus presented Zionism as an inherently religious endeavor, frequently emphasizing the need to rebuild the temple and the halakhic requirement to settle the land of Israel.94 Surely, he felt, any Jew “who serves his God with a warm heart” must agree. His use of the talmudic prooftext discussing the Temple, as quoted above, is a typical example of religious Zionist appropriation. In its original context, the quote speaks to the issue of teshuvah (literally “return” but here meaning “repentance”) in answering the question of why the Temple was rebuilt after its first
[131] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[132] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
estruction but not after its second, which therefore must indicate d some ongoing flaw in us. “Rebuilding” is a feat of religious edification, not material construction.95 Similarly, Marcus uses liturgical references to the Jewish people (‘am) chosen by God as proof of Jewish national distinction, in the modern sense of the word. To the religious Jew who would deny Jewish nationhood, Marcus asks, “Has he never learned rak ’etkhem yada‘ti mi-kol mishpachot ha’adamah [from all the tribes I acknowledge only you], has he never said, she-lo’ sam chelkenu kahem ve-goralenu ke-khol hamonam [that he has not assigned us a portion like theirs, nor our lot like all of their multitudes]? . . . Has he never made kiddush and havdalah? What remains of the ve-hivdalti ‘etchem min-ha‘ammim li-hiyot li [and I set you apart from the nations to be mine]?” 96 Marcus’s halakhic defense of Zionism manifested itself in more tangible ways as well, such as his support of one of the movement’s earliest and best-known campaigns, the call to ban Greek etrogim in favor of the new crop from Palestine.97 In one of the newspaper’s few Hebrewlanguage inserts, Marcus included a full-page advertisement, with rabbinic endorsements, encouraging readers to purchase their etrogim only from ’Erets Yisra’el.98 Support for Palestinian etrogim was one of the Zionists’ earliest campaigns, designed not only to support Jewish farmers in Palestine but also to appropriate this mitzvah and transform it into an act of Jewish national affirmation. In Marcus’s case, it enjoyed the added benefit of supporting his son’s new business venture, prominently and frequently advertised in the newspaper.99 Ha-maggid pushed this campaign as well, and, despite Fuchs’s personal conflict with Marcus, the newspaper repeatedly celebrated his son’s growing success. Its news from Kraków on August 11, 1898, for example, reported how local Hasidim were buying only from ’Erets Yisra’el and called on all Zionist groups to push this campaign. “We for our part chose a trustworthy man, an excellent lover of Zion and a God-fearing [Jew], to deal in ’Erets Yisra’el etrogim in our town and beyond it, namely Mr. Shlomo Marcus, who is selling this year excellent, stringently kosher etrogim from ’Erets Yisra’el at a cheap price.” The author hoped that no lover of Zion would violate a “clear rabbinical prohibition” of Greek etrogim and would purchase only from Palestine.100 Despite these religious views, Marcus differed from messianic Zionists such as Abraham Isaac Kook. On the one hand, Marcus— like Kook—assigned mystical significance to the land of Israel as the key to solving the “Jewish Question.” Indeed, he wrote at one point that “the true love of homeland [Vaterslandliebe] places the land even higher than the nation.” Marcus linked this to scriptural verse, in this case to Deuteronomic pledges that God would “remember the land”
and thereafter redeem his people. On the other hand, he grounded his focus on the land of Israel in pseudo-scientific racial theory. Like other ethnic nationalists,101 Marcus believed that Jews constituted a collective biological organism shaped by its formative years in its homeland: What the body is for the single individual, an organ for all expressions of the soul, the land is for the soul of the people, not only because it nourishes the body and absorbs the dying generations in its lap but also because each land—as a result of peculiar imponderables, its climate, its location—yields minerals, plants, and animals different from those of other lands and determines the peculiarities of race and nationality in humans. . . . Nature, history, religion, and politics come together, with the result that the solution of the Jewish Question can only be sought on the ground of its old homeland and its neighboring lands.102
Nevertheless, Marcus remained a pragmatist. By 1899, he had grown convinced that the Ottomans would never agree to a Jewish state in Palestine, and he became a staunch advocate of Cyprus as a temporary haven for millions of Jews. He described conditions on the island many times in great detail, and his final words to Herzl urged the leader to reconsider the option (discussed further below).103 David Moshe Friedmann and ’Ahavat Tsiyyon Despite Marcus’s energetic participation in a variety of Zionist activities, including his election to the Greater Executive Committee at the Second Congress, he is best known among scholars of Zionism for his attempt to bring David Moshe Friedmann, the Czortkower Rebbe, into Herzl’s camp.104 One of Marcus’s surviving letters to Herzl argues that, by converting a few dozen tsaddikim, particularly Friedmann, one would capture for the Zionist movement three million Jews along with the wealth of “many millionaires.”105 Herzl responded favorably to this proposal, though unfortunately a letter he wrote to the rebbe on December 28, 1896—in which he naïvely invited the rebbe’s son Israel to visit him in Vienna106 —was never delivered due to obstructionist tactics among the Hasidim.107 The elder Friedmann was already known for his support for settling the land of Israel, even as Orthodox opposition to Zionism was beginning to solidify. In December 1897, Israel Friedmann (1854–1934), the rebbe’s son and successor, granted an interview with the ZO’s newspaper, Die Welt, which reported that the court was ready to support the movement if it could
[133] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[134] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
offer religious guarantees to “Orthodox” Jewry.108 As Herzl seemed unable to deliver these guarantees, it was a renegade “practical” Zionist organization called ’Ahavat Tsiyyon that would instead earn the rebbe’s endorsement.109 ’Ahavat Tsiyyon was founded in Tarnow in 1891 with a mission to disseminate Palestinophilism to the religious masses. In 1895, the group published a Hebrew- and Yiddish-language brochure, ’Ahavat Tsiyyon, which printed approbations by leading Galician rabbis (including Simon Sofer, the late cofounder of Mahsike Hadas) on behalf of efforts to settle the land of Israel. Through such efforts, the group hoped to highlight “the relationship of Orthodoxy to Zionism and the settlement of the land of Israel.”110 In October 1896, delegates at the Galician Zionists’ fourth provincial conference reorganized ’Ahavat Tsiyyon into a regional colonization society. The delegates agreed that an organization dedicated purely to settlement activity would prove more attractive to the religious masses. Reconstituted in December 1896, the association had opened 85 branches by the following year.111 The group, committed to forming a Galician colony in Palestine, openly defied Herzl by negotiating directly with Rothschild in 1898 to fund a new settlement, Machanayim. ’Ahavat Tsiyyon’s leadership, which included Marcus, never lost sight of its raison d’être: reaching out to the traditional masses. The group’s report of its first regular meeting in May 1897 described its purpose in just these terms, praising itself for bringing together traditional rabbis with progressive Jews.112 The conference elected Rabbi Feibush Schreier its honorary chairman, and the chief rabbi of Czernowitz, Binyamin Weiss, its president. In fact, at the group’s constituting meeting the previous December, the delegates had accepted a resolution proposed by Schreier that members of any settlement founded by the new society would have to behave according to Jewish law, including observance of any custom that had achieved widespread acceptance.113 As pressure mounted against the group and its leader, Abraham Salz (1866–1942), to disband because of their opposition to political Zionism, they grew only more recalcitrant. Their defense turned largely on the argument that only a purely settlement association could succeed in attracting traditional Jews to the Zionist movement. Marcus argued this point at the Galician Zionists’ fifth provincial conference in December 1897 in defense of a motion—which narrowly passed—to retain a portion of Zionist dues in Galicia, rather than forwarding them all to Vienna. He was subsequently elected to the board of the provincial organization.114 Salz argued the same in a letter to Herzl dated October 31, 1897, in which he confidently
pointed to the spectacular growth of his association in its first months, attracting 4,000 members in 80 branches. “The quiet and true Zionism of the Hasidic rebbe,” he wrote several months later, “is more important to us than the activity, or more correctly inactivity . . . of proper Zionists.”115 This strategy paid off when a five-man delegation from ’Ahavat Tsiyyon—including Marcus and Salz—visited the court in Czortkow and enlisted Friedmann’s support for their organization. The rebbe paid his dues and became member number 2,600. ’Ahavat Tsiyyon openly published the conditions of Friedmann’s support, including his appointment of the future settlement’s rabbi and shochet (ritual slaughterer) and supervision over the future settlers to ensure that they lived according to “Torah and Mussar.”116 Friedmann’s involvement was quite substantial. In fact, it was his directive that led some members of the group in December 1897 to sever their ties with the ZO, demanding that the Viennese leaders make good on promises to establish a rabbinic committee.117 The Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung was even more forthcoming with details of Friedmann’s involvement. On February 13, 1898, Marcus printed a letter from the group advertising the rebbe’s support as well as a series of concessions it gave, assuring him of control over the “moral and religious” conditions in Machanayim. The letter was followed by a report of ’Ahavat Tsiyyon’s successful negotiations with Rothschild to fund the new colony.118 In January, the group had chosen its first six settlers. Whereas Ha-maggid announced only that each promised to provide 500 crowns and had agricultural training,119 Marcus’s newspaper made it clear that they had been personally selected by the rebbe, who also appointed Moshe Neiger its first director. “The man is a Hasid, an important talmudist, has a sharp mind, writes a splendid Hebrew as well as a correct German and French,” and was an experienced administrator. “That he knows the Sh’elah by heart certainly does not hurt,”120 Marcus added, noting for good measure that “simple caftan Jews” (traditional Jews who still wore caftans) made the best administrators—as Mr. Schubb, the shochetturned-leader at Rosh Pina, had proven. Marcus ended with words of congratulations: We wholeheartedly wish Dr. Salz luck and endurance [Consequenz] in his chosen path of tolerance and belief in the organizational capacity of ancient Jewish culture to develop, on the soil of the old homeland, through its own unique strength. This attempt must be made without ulterior motives in order to succeed.121
[135] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[136] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
This material highlights how Marcus was not simply an unwavering supporter of political Zionism. Marcus was a founding board member of ’Ahavat Tsiyyon. He not only supported practical Zionist efforts but also insisted on the need for Orthodox supervision of those settlements in direct contradiction to Herzl’s published and private comments. And this was not the only practical Zionist organization he supported. In June 1898, the Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el society in Kraków—following Marcus’s recommendation—threw their support behind the Yishuv ’Erets Ha-kodesh settlement society in Jerusalem. “The society does not oppose the principles of the Basel Congress,” reported Ha-maggid, but it intended from this point forward to support settlement directly as much as possible.122 Yet Marcus continued to portray Herzl in heroic terms throughout the remaining two years of his newspaper’s run. Moreover, when ’Ahavat Tsiyyon separated from the ZO in 1898, on the advice of Friedmann, it was ironically the group’s most devoted Hasid, Ahron Marcus, who continued to support Herzl and was therefore removed from its board.123 Thereafter, Marcus repudiated settlement efforts and reclaimed political Zionism as the “one and only way” to succeed.124 But this came only later. In the weeks leading up to the Second Congress, Marcus still viewed Zionism’s main challenge as coordinating practical and political Zionism, both of which in his mind had merit. On June 13, 1898, for example, after arguing at length for the compatibility of political and practical Zionism, he wrote to the upcoming delegates: “The task of the [Second] Basel Congress will be to bring all of these forces, which circulate wildly among and against each other, to a solemn harmony, for the general whole of the nation, including, if necessary, through selfless subordination.”125 Here he avoided discussion of the cultural question altogether. Instead, it was about coordinating practical and political Zionism. In reality, a much more divisive issue would shortly challenge the Zionist movement, quickly leading to the hemorrhaging of its religious support and consolidation of its Orthodox enemies. The Second Zionist Congress and the Cultural Zionist Threat Cultural Zionism, the movement led by Ahad Ha‘am (1856–1927) that promoted the development of Hebrew culture as the basis of a new Jewish identity, obviously undermined Herzl’s efforts to allay fears that Zionism threatened traditional Jews. Herzl had managed at the First Congress to paper over tensions between cultural Zionists
and their religious opponents, but this inevitable conflict exploded at the Second Congress. Already at the pre-congress meeting of Russian Zionists held in Warsaw, delegates had passed several resolutions assigning prime importance to cultural work. Resolutions by attending rabbis to establish a rabbinical council, or at least to present this proposal as a minority report to the congress, were resoundingly rejected.126 The appointment of a Cultural, Educational, and Literary Committee at the Second Congress, coupled with the rejection of the religious delegates’ efforts to establish a Rabbinical Board to oversee cultural activity, fortified the resolve of anti-Zionist Orthodox forces and drove many religious Zionists from the movement.127 Herzl’s call at the Second Congress to “conquer the communities” was rightfully perceived by Orthodox forces and their allies as a declaration of war against their control of eastern European Jewry, and it certainly reinforced this impression of the Second Congress. So did the appointment of Jacob Bernstein-Kogan, who was responsible for coordinating contact for Russian Zionism in place of Rabbi Mohilewer, who had just passed away. Russian Zionist propaganda would henceforth be free of Orthodox influence.128 Marcus served as a delegate to the Second Congress as well, once again elected by Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el.129 Marcus had only just launched his Zionist periodical and had no intention of withdrawing from the movement; he responded vociferously to this perceived threat. Like all religious Zionists, Marcus strongly opposed Cultural Zionism. His attacks on its leaders were frequent in the pages of the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung. In one report from the Third Zionist Congress in 1899, for example, Marcus contrasted the Orthodox representatives, respected by all parties, to the “Russian students” who “in no way can be considered real representatives of the people,” despite their dominating rhetoric at the congress. Marcus blamed the electoral system for giving these “young-blooded representatives” such disproportionate power.130 He particularly singled out two leading advocates of Cultural Zionism, Marcus Ehrenpreis (1869–1951) and, to a lesser extent, Yehoshua Thon (1870–1936), both modern rabbis and among the founders of Galician Zionism.131 Gershom Bader recalls an amusing episode with Thon that highlights Marcus’s attitude toward their position. At the Second Zionist Congress, Herzl included Marcus in his assembly of visiting rabbis, not realizing in his naïveté that Marcus—despite his caftan and sidelocks—was not in fact a rabbi. Thon, then a preacher at the modern synagogue in Kraków, made a comment to this effect. Marcus responded that Thon was correct but that in fact Kraków had
[137] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[138] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
sent no rabbis at all, for Thon was a preacher in the Kraków Reform Temple and thus had “nothing to do with an emes’r rabbanus [genuine rabbinate].”132 Marcus’s attack on Cultural Zionists did not originate with the Second Congress. Already in the second issue of his paper, Marcus had attempted to use the threat of Cultural Zionism to harmonize his support of ’Ahavat Tsiyyon with Herzlian Zionism by creating a common enemy. In February 1898, the Cultural Zionist journal Hashillo’ach—in an anonymous article quickly exposed as the work of Ehrenpreis—sharply attacked Salz as a “traitor” to enlightenment for bowing down to Hasidic fanatics and handing over control of ’Ahavat Tsiyyon to the Czortkower Rebbe.133 Marcus’s front-page defense of Salz introduced the journal as the well-known “thorn in the eye of the Basel Congress” because of its January 1898 critique of that assembly. He then proceeded—in the same sentence—to describe its latest attack (that is, on “our camp”), namely its rebuke of Salz and ’Ahavat Tsiyyon. The implicit argument is clear: practical and political Zionists were of one camp whose enemies, the culturalists (kulturisten), were attempting to scuttle their holy work.134 Coming out of the Second Congress, Marcus celebrated what he perceived as the movement’s growing penetration among traditional Jews, “for whom denomination and nationality are inextricably linked,” whose attitudes he insisted must be reflected in the Congress’s program.135 He then identified the enemies of the Zionist movement: western assimilated Jews, “a thorn in the eye” who through “Machiavellian” tactics were mobilizing religion on their behalf, and “atheistic [confessionslos] young Zionists” in the east, who, Marcus argued, used Zionism as a substitute for their rejected religion. In contrast, Marcus viewed Zionism—with Hegelian certainty strengthened by religious conviction—as the guiding force of history: “From a purely religious perspective, we perceive in Zionism a historical process that establishes itself despite complicated obstacles with the iron necessity of a law of creation and to which we are called, through rational initiative, to participate.”136 For this rational initiative to succeed, however, Marcus insisted that it must remain focused on the political Zionist objective of obtaining a legal mandate for Palestine. “For the true Jew, only Palestine in the broadest sense—at most the area between the Euphrates, Lebanon, the Red and Mediterranean seas—comes into question, something that Zionism, in its very name, acknowledges.”137 As noted elsewhere in this article, only after Herzl’s failure to secure the support of the Ottoman sultan in 1899 would Marcus consider other possibilities as a temporary haven.
By the time of the Second Congress, Marcus’s religious demands had grown more pronounced, but so too had his confidence that Herzl firmly supported him in this regard. His celebration of the accomplishments of political Zionism, particularly the congress itself as well as Herzl’s alleged program with the Turkish regime, is typically framed in an argument that the key to its success will be the religious foundation of Jewish settlements. This he grounds in Herzl’s call to return to Jewishness (Judenthum) in order to claim Herzlian support.138 Marcus made this point absolutely clear in his summary of the camps at the Second Zionist Congress. First, he wrote, there was Nordau’s pure political Zionism, “which calls for the political regeneration of Jewry [Judenthum] without regard to their religious condition.” Despite his personal distaste for Nordau, “who happened to be born a Jew,” Marcus declared himself as distant from those rabbis who damn Nordau as antireligious as he was from those who declared him to be a penitent returnee to Judaism. The second camp, represented here by Nathan Birnbaum, was “anti-confessional” Zionism, a “children’s illness” that he condemned as totally insignificant to the “organism of the Godly constitution of Judaism.” (The distinction between this group and the culturists, whom he attacked as the fourth camp, is unclear.) The third camp, his choice, was “Herzl’s Zionism, with the program of returning to Jewishness.” Herzl’s program was defined not as “pure political Zionism,” which he ascribed to Nordau, but as the return to Jewishness, here understood religiously. “This return,” he continued, “is very simply: spurn evil and do good [sur me-ra‘ va-‘aseh tov].” Here he was hinting at a position of religious neutrality, that the future settlements would be under religious authority but would tolerate secular colonists. He contrasted his tolerance with the fourth camp at the congress, the culturalists, who sought to destroy Judaism. As with his first Zionist publication, he once again grounded this approach in Moses Hess, whom he quoted praising Hasidim as the backbone of the future national revival.139 Writing just after the Second Congress rejected the demands of religious Zionists for a rabbinical council to oversee cultural and educational activities, Marcus argued that the only way to avoid the catastrophic conditions of Argentina would be to reassert religious control over the movement and over the young rebels. This was the reason, he explained, for the upcoming synod of religious Zionists in Kattowitz, which was to bring together sympathetic rabbis from Germany and eastern Europe.140 Marcus ended the newspaper edition by celebrating the establishment of the Dorshei Shalom Tsiyyon society in Lemberg, whose statutes he printed in full. He stressed that the society boasted 300 members despite its requirement that members be observant, spe-
[139] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[140] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
cifically that no member would be accepted who shaves his beard “against Jewish custom and ritual law,” suggesting that upholding rigorous religious standards was the best way to build the movement.141 Marcus’s response to Herzl’s call to “conquer the communities” was similarly idiosyncratic. As Luz has noted, the slogan itself was a “declaration of war against [traditionalists]; it could not fail to increase the antagonism between the Zionists and the Orthodox and provoke the latter into total warfare against the outsiders trying to usurp their positions of leadership and undermine the foundations of traditional society.”142 Marcus, however, defended Herzl vociferously in this regard. He argued at one point that Herzl meant only western Europe, “where it is completely appropriate.”143 Yet he expressed sympathy with those who sought to challenge communal leadership in eastern Europe as well. In his coverage of local Galician politics, Marcus—like other Galician Zionists—also took aim at his communities’ “so-called Jewish representatives.” On March 29, 1898, for example, he printed a call for “true representatives” of the Jews to be present at a proposed provincial meeting of Galician communities. This is typically code for Zionists, but here Marcus identified a broader cross-section of the community: “The rebbes, rabbis, and preachers, the academics, the merchants, and the Hasidim.”144 By publicly justifying a political coalition that included academics and calling for a populist alternative to the existing governing coalition of the Hasidic establishment and Polonized elite, Marcus was challenging his own religious community. Similarly, on June 13, Marcus attacked the “Jewish” parliamentary representatives from Galicia, who, he writes, were only just then asking for government help in curbing the wave of pogroms that had erupted earlier that year. “Thank God we are not dependent on the help of our representatives,” he continued, for “Governor Count Piniðski is well known as a friend to humanity and enemy of anarchic disturbances to the peace.”145 This clear rebuke of those leaders indirectly admonished the religious and Hasidic establishment, which largely supported the Polish parliamentary faction in which these Jews sat. The article concludes, “The humanity and sense of duty of the authorities and the healthy sense of our people are with God’s help better security than our elected representatives.”146 Marcus’s Final Effort In January 1900, Marcus—still working tirelessly to bring the Hasidic world into the Zionist fold—won Herzl’s support for renewed negoti-
ations with Friedmann.147 Marcus traveled to Czortkow with Salz and Thon, where they were received by the rebbe who gave his blessing for a rabbinic conference charged with negotiating with Herzl for their support of the Jewish Colonial Trust. The conference was to be organized by the chief rabbi of Czernowitz, Binyamin Weiss, who demanded first a written invitation from the rebbe, which Marcus secured.148 But it was not to be. The obstacle was apparently not on Marcus’s side. On February 11, Marcus acknowledged Herzl’s letter in which the Zionist leader wrote that he could not personally come to Czortkow but would “send somebody if necessary.” Marcus replied that Herzl’s appearance was absolutely vital. Friedmann stood completely behind the Zionist movement, he wrote, but insisted on a personal meeting with Herzl. If Herzl would come, Marcus assured him, he would “fulfill his life’s work.” One of the rebbe’s attendants shared a private Hebrew letter with Marcus, written by the rebbe to Herzl eight months earlier, in which he referred to Herzl as a “saving angel.” (Another, more senior attendant, Hirsch Rapaport, “correctly” persuaded him not to send the letter for fear of causing problems among other rabbis.) Marcus also shared the still unpublished news that Friedmann had lost a costly legal dispute against Christian opponents of his court in Czortkow and that he intended to move to Palestine. In short, he anticipated that Herzl’s personal intervention would at once eliminate the entire religious movement against him and “assure Zionism’s ultimate success.”149 One week later, Marcus sent another letter. He reiterated his great optimism and revealed his additional hope that their project would redirect the traditional financial support of Jews in Palestine, the socalled Chaluka, through the Zionists’ central agency and thereby bring order to its distribution.150 On February 26, with no response from Herzl, Marcus wrote yet again. He asked bluntly whether or not Herzl wanted to pursue the rabbinic assembly, where he could once and for all settle the religious question. He also announced that he had finished his book of rabbinic texts in support of Zionism and, more dramatically, that he and his wife had decided to move to Palestine.151 Still he received no word from Vienna, and so on March 25 Marcus finally told Herzl that it was too late. He expressed frustration at the latter’s inattention to pursuing a relationship with the eastern European rabbinical leadership and announced his withdrawal from the whole affair.152 Marcus had rallied—under the leadership of the elder Friedmann—a long list of rabbinic and Hasidic leaders in both Galicia and Russia willing to meet with representatives of the ZO to d iscuss their conditions for directing a campaign among their supporters
[141] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[142] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
to purchase thousands of shares of the Jewish Colonial Trust.153 Friedmann—and, of course, Marcus—were convinced that these men, unlike their Hungarian counterparts, supported the notion of settling the land of Israel. Marcus even included a packet of letters from leading Russian rabbis indicating their desire to negotiate with Herzl. They had initially planned on organizing their own conference, but Friedmann instructed Marcus instead to bring the proposal to a previously scheduled rabbinical conference in Vilna.154 After these repeated letters to Vienna asking for a response to the opportunity went unanswered, despite Herzl having himself approved this project back in January, Marcus told the Zionist leader that he was done. But Marcus’s March 25 letter to Herzl did not represent his “swan song” for the Zionist movement.155 Despite the publication that month of ’Or La-yesharim, which largely solidified the alliance of Hasidim (led by Shalom Dovber Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe) and Mitnagdim against Zionism,156 Marcus in fact remained an active Zionist for another six months. He announced his son Shlomo’s wedding in Die Welt in April, indicating that he still considered himself part of the movement.157 Marcus also restarted his own newspaper in July, which (as noted below) looked forward to the Fourth Zionist Congress with guarded optimism. In fact, Marcus was elected as a delegate to that assembly by two separate districts, and he intended to participate.158 Moreover, Marcus continued to correspond with Herzl throughout the spring and summer. To be sure, the letters did not discuss solely Zionist issues. Marcus needed Herzl’s help. Already in February 1900, Marcus had indicated that he was in dire financial straights, barely able to afford his journey home from Czortkow, having just lost a costly court battle with the Rothschilds over his wine business. He urgently requested the “remaining 50 florin” from Herzl, a reference to the promise of a 100-florin subsidy to support his Zionist activities. When Oser Kokesch (1860–1905), head of the ZO’s Action Committee, sent a curt, one-sentence letter on May 22 saying that they were cutting his stipend “for budgetary reasons,” Marcus exploded. In late May, he shot off two bitter and angry letters within two days. He expressed astonishment that he should spend weeks on a mission to Czortkow of such vital importance, threatening the existence of his family “which cannot live on air,” and then be snubbed over petty finances. He attacked Kokesch for being disconnected from Jewish values and accused the Zionist bank’s director for wasting large sums of money through mismanagement. And he recalled how Kokesch belied
Zionist rhetoric about supporting products from Palestine when his actions had forced Marcus to sue Rothschild over his wine business back in 1898. (The circumstances are not clear from the letter, but it compelled Marcus at the time to appeal to Herzl for a personal loan, which he described as a humiliating affair.)159 Indeed, the entire reason for the modest stipend in the first place was “as balsam on the wounds” following his defeat by Rothschild. Even after awarding the money, the committee delayed giving it to Marcus until finally he was forced to walk miles by foot in “Siberian cold” at the end of the Sabbath to pick up the money from his “savior, whom I wished to the devil.” Marcus did not blame Herzl for any of these abuses, but he now questioned the state of the movement and, for the first time, Herzl’s control of it. “I love and highly respect Dr. Herzl, but the undertaking has climbed over his strengths.”160 Aside from a handful of supporters, he lamented, the organization is like a “military unit without troops.” “The Congress has become a farce. . . . Your warning, not to push the rabbis aside, went unheeded,” and its continued unrealistic focus on Turkey risked its legitimacy. “If Zionism maintains its dramatic stance, then it has lost its right to exist.” Only Cyprus would save the movement, he argued, and yet he wondered why it was viewed as a crime against Zionism to support temporary settlement there. Marcus recalled how Herzl himself told him at the congress regarding Cyprus, “I want it,” and yet a year later told him, “Cyprus never occurred to me!” Finally, as to Cyprus constituting a betrayal of Zionism, Marcus defended himself against the “terrorism of desolate screamers and immature, half-Asiatic students, who don’t understand that I, as long as I have been thinking, have never yet been forced to retract a well thought-through judgment.” And yet, he still held Herzl in high regard. He ended by apologizing for taking up the leader’s valuable time and assuring Herzl of his “sincere admiration and devotion.” These letters did finally elicit a response from Herzl, but one far more curt and professional than his earlier letters, perhaps betraying Herzl’s own change of heart regarding Marcus.161 Marcus published one final issue of the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, in July 1900, in which he previewed the upcoming Fourth Zionist Congress in London. It was his first issue in over six months, a hiatus Marcus explained by detailing his need to defend his son Hirsch in Vienna against a blood libel.162 Even at this late date, the newspaper gave no indication of Marcus’s intent to withdraw from the movement. On the contrary, he remained firm in his defense of Zionism, despite it costing him some erstwhile supporters in Germany. Recalling an exchange with a dayyan (religious judge) in Frankfurt about the best means of
[143] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[144] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
strengthening the religious fidelity of the Orthodox youth, Marcus— despite his own academic work—attacked the “so-called” Orthodox leadership in Germany for viewing secular studies as the best defense against assimilation. He explicitly equated them with Reform in their shared opposition to Zionism, a position he called “a bloody mockery of the truth.” In contrast, he wrote, “I see in Zionism the strongest defense against the treacherous high aspirations of assimilation parties, more effective than teaching science. . . . Only the fixed unwavering determination to be a Jew and to have Jewish descendents can form the basis for a loving engagement with Jewish education.”163 Yet Marcus decided that it was no longer possible to protect the Hasidic intelligentsia, “whose spiritual activity was a hundred times more active than the western Jews,” from secular Hebrew literature. He announced the addition of a new Hebrew-language supplement in future editions of the newspaper that would ensure their “victory in the struggle between belief and science.”164 The newspaper’s preview of the upcoming congress remained cautiously optimistic, but Marcus’s participation in the ZO was coming to an end. The July issue, half the usual length, was the newspaper’s last. Yocheved Segal’s hagiography of Marcus accuses government censors of shutting down the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, angry that his brilliant refutation of biblical criticism and other critiques of Judaism were preventing the complete assimilation of the Jews.165 In truth, the government had no such agenda, and there is no evidence that it closed down the newspaper. It is far more likely that Marcus, who was withdrawing from the Zionist movement, lost interest in participating in its debates. That this was his last issue certainly suggests it was the news paper’s Zionist function that drove Marcus to publish it, rather than the scholarship. It had always appeared somewhat irregularly, so may also have collapsed for want of financial resources. As we have seen, Marcus struggled to pay his rent during these months and could not count on a renewal of the ZO’s subsidy. In many ways, the newspaper symbolized Marcus himself. It seamlessly combined a defense of Orthodoxy and Hasidism with support for Zionism generally and for Herzl specifically. Its closing signified the end of this stage of Marcus’s life. On August 12, 1900, Marcus wrote his final letter to Herzl. He informed Herzl that he had finally received his full 100-florin subsidy to attend the upcoming congress but that it was “in vain.” Marcus felt that his opponents in the ZO—culturalists as well as personal enemies such as Kokesch—were pushing him out. He believed that they were embarrassed by their shameful treatment of him but also that they simply
wanted to shift the movement in a different direction. In the end, he argued, the movement abandoned him and not the other way around: In my life, I have never once given up an idea whose ethical and religious justification had irrefutably been established to me. If Zionism does not achieve its desired successes, this will be attributable to its flirtation with half-Jewish elements and its unconscious antipathy toward contacts with the essence of the folk.166
He concluded by urging Herzl to reconsider Cyprus, which he argued would serve as an excellent asylum for suffering Jews in Romania and Bessarabia. “I cannot see any practical reason for a change of view in this matter,” he wrote, “and the bawling of the Russian students doesn’t impress me.” Then he offered his true swan song: It’s enough, I hope, that you will permit the deeply felt expression of my regret, from the bottom of my heart, that I have been prevented to appear in the circle of brothers who want to do something for the welfare of our people. With sincere respect, Ahron Marcus.167
With these words, Marcus abandoned his dream of delivering the Hasidim to Herzl. Already frustrated at Herzl’s lack of cooperation with the rabbinical conference he had struggled to organize, he felt personally betrayed by the ZO’s reneging on its financial obligations to him and the growing power of “half-Asian” culturalists within it. He may also have found it too difficult to fight the solidly and militantly anti-Zionist attitude of traditionalist Jewry—including his own Hasidic leadership—and still remain within that society. Midway through the year 1900, the rebbes of Boyan, Sadigora, and Czortkow (all descendents of R. Yisrael of Ruzhin) had issued manifestos against Zionism,168 though Israel Friedmann continued to defend vigorously the mitzvah of settling the land of Israel and its power to hasten the messianic era.169 In 1912, Marcus joined his rebbe Israel Friedmann along with other similarly disillusioned religious Zionists and traveled to Kattowitz to lay the foundations for a new type of Jewish political organization, ’Agudat Yisra’el. Following his rebbe’s example, Marcus continued to argue for the mitzvah of settling the land of Israel, which he now intended to pursue through this new organization. “The land of Israel needs to be at the center of our program,” he declared at the conference’s preliminary meeting. “Only in the land of Israel can we realize and shape great, eternal values.” His comments received a strong ovation.170 Marcus died four years later, in Frankfurt, having returned to his native Germany to escape the front in World War I.
[145] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
Conclusion [146] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Marcus certainly shared many ideas typical of religious Zionists at the time. Against his religious detractors, he defended the compatibility of political Zionism and Judaism through rabbinic prooftexts, or else simply expressed outrage that liberal western rabbis would dare to raise halakhic objections at all. He also strongly opposed Cultural Zionism and objected to the “young bloods’” disproportionate influence at the congresses. Moreover, although he was no longer a member of the ZO in 1903 and thus could not join Mizrahi in support of Herzl’s Uganda proposal, beginning in 1899 he strongly advocated for the settlement of Cyprus as a “temporary haven” for Jews anxious to escape Russia. Nevertheless, Marcus defied the religious establishment in his repeated opposition to the Orthodox-backed Jewish parliamentary representatives who sat as members of the Polish faction. Like all Zionists, Marcus called for “genuine” Jewish representatives who would supposedly better represent Jewish—and not Polish—national interests. Moreover, Marcus never questioned Herzl’s own religious credentials. Like other religious Zionists, Marcus latched onto Herzl’s statement that Zionism meant “a return to Jewishness [Judenthum] even before there is a return to the Jewish land” as proof of his religious sensibilities, despite his pronounced lack of observance. Unlike most others, however, Marcus expressed a basic idea of secular Jewish nationalism when he labeled the unobservant Herzl a better Jew than his Orthodox critics, arguing that the foundation of Judaism lay in recognizing and strengthening Jewish nationhood. And, unlike other supporters of temporary settlements outside of the land of Israel such as Yitzchak Reines, Marcus continued to ascribe religious and even messianic significance to the Zionist project. Notably, none of these positions—nor the academic work that he continued to publish in German—led to any attempts to cast doubt on his religious credentials, as happened to other leading religious Zionists. In the end, Marcus remained a loyal Hasid of Czortkow. In virtually every way his Zionism followed the positions and especially the timing of his primary rebbe, David Moshe Friedmann, and his son Israel Friedmann after him. Marcus’s continued support of Zionism in the 1890s, by which time most courts (most importantly Belz) had withdrawn their support, his devotion to political Zionism combined with a messianic understanding of the mitzvah of settling the land of Israel, his comfort with the secular Herzl’s leadership but demand for religious control of the new settlements, and his ultimate withdrawal
from the movement while continuing to push for settling the land of Israel via ’Agudat Yisra’el all reflect the influence of Czortkow, as did Marcus’s passionate defense of Hasidism in the pages of his newspaper and in his other publications. Marcus decided to move to Palestine just when he thought his rebbe had the same intention, and yet ultimately—like his rebbe—he remained in Europe. Even Marcus’s continued friendly relationship with Mizrahi followed the lead of Friedmann, who in 1907—despite his public stance against Zionism—opposed Mahsike Hadas and endorsed a secular Zionist candidate for parliament.171 Only in quitting ’Ahavat Tsiyyon in 1898 in favor of the ZO did Marcus possibly deviate from his rebbe’s example, but even here the situation could be seen otherwise. Friedmann had not yet ruled out the possibility of coming to an agreement with the ZO at that time, so Marcus’s decision to remain on that group’s Greater Executive Committee (which forced his removal from ’Ahavat Tsiyyon) was arguably no deviation at all. Finally, just as contemporary Hasidic memory of Marcus tends to gloss over his Zionist activities, so too has Hasidic hagiography understated and even rewritten the history of the Friedmanns’ relationship with the ZO, which is now portrayed as hostile from the very beginning.172 Israel Friedmann himself later disputed rumors that his court had been greatly enamored of Herzl.173 Marcus’s hagiographers may indeed be correct in describing him as a true Hasid. It is instructive that Marcus not only continued to participate in the Zionist movement after the Second Congress but also intensified his involvement through the publication of the Krakauer Jüdische Z eitung. Even after the publication of ’Or La-yesharim, Marcus refused to quit the movement for another six months. He maintained his personal attachment to Herzl and found excuses not to blame the Zionist leader for the movement’s problems. At a minimum, this tempers Salmon’s statement that “the majority position at the [second] congress precluded the further participation of the traditionalists in the movement.”174 As Salmon notes, as late as 1900 Marcus made another concerted effort to recruit a broad spectrum of the eastern European rabbinic intelligentsia. Considering Marcus’s heavyweight backing in Czortkow, and the elder Friedmann’s optimism regarding rabbinic support (outside of Hungary) for an agreement with the ZO, Herzl probably had two more years—until the spring of 1900—in which he might have chosen to forge a different coalition, one that included traditionalists in eastern Europe. Thus, Marcus’s fascinating story does not merely elucidate this early, critical moment in the development of both Jewish nationalism and Orthodoxy. It also illustrates
[147] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[148] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
opportunities not taken, political roads not traveled, and forms of Jewish identity that ultimately proved untenable.
Notes I would like to thank Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, David Sorkin, Adam Mendelsohn, and the anonymous readers for commenting on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Nancy Nenno for help in translating several German passages and to David Engel for first suggesting that I investigate Ahron Marcus. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs at the College of Charleston. Except as noted above, all translations from foreign-language sources are mine. 1 Mayer Ebner, “Memories of the First Zionist Congress,” Zion 2, nos. 4–6 (Aug. 1951): 49. Cited in Willy Aron, “Herzl and Aron Marcus,” Herzl Year Book I (New York, 1958), 183. 2 My thanks to Israel Zwi Marcus, Ahron’s great-great-grandson, for providing this image as well as copies of several surviving letters by Marcus, Markus Marcus’s biography, and Ahron Marcus’s work, Der Chassidismus. 3 Marcus’s major manuscripts include Hartmanns inductive Philosphie im Chassidismus (Vienna, 1888), Katmoniyyot (Kraków, 1896), Der Chassidismus (Pleschen, 1901), and Barsilai oder Sprache als Schrift der Psyche (Berlin, 1905). The latter two books were both published posthumously in Hebrew translation. For an intellectual biography of Marcus, see the obituary published on the occasion of his first yarzeit. Julius Müller, “Ahron Marcus,” Jeschurun (Mar./May 1917): 154–60, 248–52. 4 Markus Marcus, Ahron Marcus: Die Lebensgeschichte eines Chossid (Basel, 1966); Yokheved Segel, He-chasid me-Hamburg: Sippur chayyav shel Rabbi Aharon Markus (Jerusalem, 1977), translated as The Chasid from Hamburg: A Portrait of Rabbi Aharon Marcus, a Man of Truth, Courage, Genius and Humility (New York, 2004). Segel’s biography, as well as that of Marcus’s granddaughter Chana Banet (Be-tsel korato shel Natsi: Sippur chayyeha shel nitsulat sho’ah [Tel Aviv, 1987]), rely heavily on the 1966 monograph. Banet’s version was also partially translated into English as They Called Me Frau Anna (New York, 1990). 5 It is not clear how widely the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung was read, but it probably did not reach far beyond Kraków, where businesses supplied the bulk of his advertisements. Approximately one-third of each edition covered Zionist issues, typically the first pages, with the remaining space devoted to topics of Jewish history and religion. Subjects ranged from archaeological discoveries to Maimonides and translations of classic Hasidic texts.
6 See http://compactmemory.de (accessed Aug. 16, 2010). I would like to thank the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków for providing me with a digital copy of the entire run of the newspaper. 7 Yitzchak Rafael, Ri’shonim va-’acharonim (Jerusalem, 1957), 382. The story is also told by Gershom Bader (1868–1953)—one of the founding fathers of Galician Zionism—in his unpublished Yiddish-language biography of Marcus. Gershom Bader Papers, Y IVO Institute for Jewish Research, 4 (of Marcus pages). This is a particularly valuable—and previously untapped—archival source since Bader knew Marcus personally. 8 More specifically, he supposedly feared sowing contention between those Hasidim who would have liked his work and those who would have opposed it. This might refer to the famous conflict between Sanz and Sadigor Hasidim. Gershom Bader claims to have heard this explanation directly from Marcus. Bader Papers, 3. Marcus also wanted to avoid corrupting eastern European Jewry through exposure to modern Hebrew literature. Krakauer Jüdischer Zeitung, July 1900, p. 3. 9 Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago, 1996), 10, 13. See also Yosef Salmon, Religion and Zionism: First Encounters (Jerusalem, 2001), and Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement (1882–1904) (Philadelphia, 1988), both of which stress the breakdown of Orthodox-Zionist relations in the 1890s, despite areas of cooperation in the previous decade. 10 None of those sources, however, have drawn on the Krakauer Jüdischer Zeitung. See especially N. M. Gelber, Toledot ha-tenu‘ah ha-tsiyyonit beGalitsya, 1875–1918 (Jerusalem, 1958), and Y. Alfasi, “Ha-chasidut vehahit‘orerut ha-le’ummit” (Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, 1979), later published in a shortened edition as Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon (Tel Aviv, 1986). More recently, Yosef Salmon, drawing heavily on those two authors, has referenced Marcus in several of his works. See his Religion and Zionism as well as several of his other articles that have been recently republished in Hebrew translation. Y. Salmon, ’Im ta‘iru ve-’im te‘oreru: Ortodoksiyah bi-metsarei ha-le’ummiyyut (Jerusalem, 2006). 11 Aron, “Herzl and Aron Marcus,” and idem, “Ahron Marcus: Der deitsch vos iz gevorna chosid,” YIVO Bleter 39, no. 1 (1947): 143–48. Most of his English-language piece is a translation of some of the surviving letters, discussed in the text below. The Yiddish article includes a helpful bibliography. See also Aron’s eulogy of Marcus in Ha-do’ar, Jan. 1, 1965, pp. 133–34, reprinted in his memoir, Hamburg moladti, ‘ir ve’em be-Yisra’el: Pirkei zikhronot (New York, 1967), 87–91. 12 I thank the Central Zionist Archives (hereafter, CZA) for scanning over 20 surviving letters in the Marcus files, principally correspondence between Marcus and Herzl, and sending them to me for my research. 13 Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, 36. Ehud Luz writes similarly that, by 1898, “three major conceptions of the rela-
[149] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[150] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
tionship between Jewish tradition and modern nationalism became evident in Eastern European Jewish society: secular Zionism, religious Zionism, and anti-Zionist Orthodoxy” (Parallels Meet, 287). 14 See, e.g., Gershon Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Israel in Poland, 1916–1939 (Jerusalem, 1996); Jess Olson, “Nation, Peoplehood, and Religion in the Life and Thought of Nathan Birnbaum” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2006); and my own “National Regeneration in the Diaspora: Zionism, Politics and Jewish Identity in Late Habsburg Galicia, 1883–1907” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002). 15 Marcus to Herzl, May 6, 1896, CZA. 16 Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Lebanon, N.H., 1995), 48. 17 Gelber claims that Marcus’s Zionist work earned him many enemies but is vague about whom. Gelber, Toledot, 784. In one letter, Marcus does claim to have drawn Herzl’s enemies onto himself, but here he specifically identifies central European Jews, including former friends in Frankfurt. Marcus to Herzl, Mar. 1, 1898, CZA. 18 His mother died when he was just three years old, and his father died trying to make a living in London soon thereafter. M. Marcus, Ahron Marcus, 13. 19 See the works cited above in note 3. That claim—among others—is repeated in Marcus’s front-page obituary in the Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt, Mar. 10, 1916. Bader, though still praising Marcus’s intellect, is less obsequious and describes him as having only learned “a bisl gemarah” (a little Talmud) by the time he finished gymnasium. Bader Papers, 2. 20 Aron, “Ahron Marcus: Der deitsch,” 144. 21 According to his obituarist in the Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt, Marcus stayed in Boskowitz a full year. Likewise, Julius Müller also claims that Marcus followed Lipschütz to Boskowitz but says that Marcus discovered Hasidism from a student at the yeshivah in Galicia, whom he then followed back to Kraków. Müller, “Ahron Marcus,” 154. 22 M. Marcus, Ahron Marcus, 8, 40–52. This version is roughly confirmed in Marcus’s obituary in the Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt and the brief biography of Marcus by Rafael, Ri’shonim va-’acharonim, 381. Gelber also credits the influence of Lipschütz but seems to know nothing of Moravia, writing that Lipschütz sent him from Hamburg to Galicia in order to experience “authentic Judaism.” Gelber, Toledot, 236. Gershom Bader, who claims to have heard it directly from Marcus himself, also writes nothing of Moravia and instead claims that Marcus toured Hasidic study houses throughout Hungary and Galicia before settling in Kraków at age 30. Bader Papers, 2. 23 Rafael, Ri’shonim va-’acharonim, 382. 24 Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt, Mar. 10, 1916. 25 Ahron Marcus, Dr. Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat (Kraków, 1897), 7–8. Simon Sofer was the son of the famous rabbi Moses Sofer, known as the Chatam Sofer.
26 Ha-maggid, Jan. 17, 1883, pp. 20–21. 27 Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 69–70. Ehud Luz’s comment that, already in the 1880s, Zionists in Galicia “faced almost wall-to-wall opposition from the Hasidic rebbes” thus seems overstated, though some certainly did and nearly all came out against the Zionists during the 1890s. Luz, Parallels Meet, 114–16. 28 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 126–27. See also Luz, Parallels Meet, 70–77. 29 Bader Papers, 4. 30 See Gelber, Toledot, 236–40, and the sources cited there. The branch was christened Chovevei ’Erets Yisra’el at its first regular meeting in November 1893, at which Marcus delivered a “particularly” inspirational speech to tumultuous applause on the sorry state of the Jewish settlement in Argentina in contrast to the “beautiful scenes” in Palestine. Marcus was elected German-language secretary. Selbst-Emancipation, Dec. 1, 1893, p. 4. 31 Selbst-Emancipation, Aug. 29, 1892, pp. 164–65. 32 That relationship later went sour, and Marcus lost a costly court battle with Rothschild. See Bader Papers, 4, and Marcus letters cited below. Ha-maggid announced Marcus’s wine and cognac venture with the Horowitz brothers on Mar. 24, 1898, p. 97; on p. 100 was an advertisement of his wares, naturally under the kosher supervision of Badats Yerushalayim. The firm was also advertised in the early issues of his Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung. 33 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 286. According to Marcus, Friedmann had even begun negotiations with Jewish leaders in the Ottoman Empire to obtain the sultan’s permission for Jewish immigration to Palestine. See Marcus’s letter to Herzl on May 6, 1896, CZA. 34 On Ben Yehuda’s arrest and subsequent developments in Palestine, see Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 226–34. 35 Fuchs expressed a wide range of insults and name-calling in a long series of articles beginning in Jan. 1894. 36 Bader Papers, 5. Fuchs had been among those who—because of Marcus’s Orthodoxy and particularly his statements that Zionists need not necessarily learn Hebrew—had opposed his election to head the Zion branch in Kraków. Ha-maggid, Nov. 16, 1893, pp. 2–3, cited in Gelber, Toledot, 238. 37 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 233–34, 272. 38 Ibid., 251–59. 39 Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 28. 40 Ha-maggid, Nov. 29, 1894, p. 370, and Jan. 2, 1896, p. 5. Marcus continued to serve on the board for several years. 41 Yosef Salmon, “Zionism and Anti-Zionism in Eastern Europe,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapiro (Lebanon, N.H., 1998), 30. 42 Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, 48–49.
[151] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[152] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
43 For example, Herzl used Marcus to rebut Moritz Güdemann, chief rabbi of Vienna, whose book Nationaljudentum had accused Zionism of religious unorthodoxy. Herzl quotes Marcus’s published lecture on Der Judenstaat that Orthodox circles had for decades supported settling the land of Israel “with the express purpose of forming a state,” and that “even the most Orthodox Jews are willing to accept proposals for a political regeneration of Jewry which are being made by some of the most modern freethinkers.” Herzl, “Dr. Güdemann’s ‘Nationaljudenthum,’” Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, Apr. 23, 1897, p. 2. English translation in Theodor Herzl, Zionist Writings (New York, 1973), 65. 44 Luz, Parallels Meet, 141. “This Ahron Marcus in Podgórze must know it,” Herzl continued in his rebuttal to Güdemann. “He himself is a ‘chossid’ [sic], but nonetheless a highly educated and sharp author who has composed a remarkable book on the more recent philosophies. In his civil life, however, he is a merchant. ‘He lives not from Jewry [Judenthum],’ as our friend Leon Kellner said, ‘but rather for Jewry.’” Herzl, “Dr. Güdemann’s ‘Nationaljudenthum,’” 2. 45 Marcus to Herzl, May 6, 1896. See Theodor Herzls Tagebücher, 1895–1904 (Berlin, 1922), 397. 46 Die Welt, Aug. 8, 1897, p. 3; Die Welt, Aug. 13, 1897, p. 6. 47 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 289. 48 Aron cites a nonexistent report on the First Zionist Congress from a nonexistent issue of the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, dated half a year before it was launched. Aron, “Herzl and Aron Marcus,” 186. 49 See, e.g., Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Nov. 13, 1898, Dec. 13, 1898, pp. 8–13, and July 1899, p. 13. See an announcement of the newspaper’s launch and the content of its first two issues in Ha-maggid, Jan. 20, 1898, p. 22, and Feb. 25, 1898, p. 63. 50 Luz, Parallels Meet, 121. 51 Marcus to Herzl, Apr. 27, 1896, CZA. 52 Ibid. Laibel Taubes (1863–1933), a founder of the Yiddish press in Galicia and the first person to produce a Yiddish edition of Der Judenstaat, felt the same way. Instead of translating Herzl’s book into Yiddish, Taubes simply transliterated the German text into Hebrew script, which he felt would preserve a sense of seriousness and realism. On Taubes, see Joshua Shanes, “Papers for the Folk: Jewish Nationalism and the Birth of the Yiddish Press in Galicia,” Polin 16 (2003): 167–87. 53 Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 35. Similarly, when the rebbe’s antiZionist attendant expressed surprise at his master’s encouragement of Marcus, asking “Herzl will bring us to ’Erets Yisra’el? Herzl will be our Messiah?,” the rebbe reportedly responded, “The purpose of Dr. Herzl is to be an intermediary between kings and ministers and the community of Israel.” Zvi Cohen, “Ha-’admorim me-chortkov ve-yachasam leshivat tsiyyon,” in Sefer yizkor le-hantsachat kedoshei kehillat Chortkov, ed. Yeshayahu Austridan (Haifa, 1967), 69. 54 Those who supported that ruling in 1882 included R. Yehoshua Rokeach
of Belz, R. Shlomo Halberstam of Bobov, R. Yehoshua Horowitz of Zhidikov, R. Menachem Mendel of Vishnitz, and even R. Yaakov Friedmann of Sadigora. Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 68–69. 55 Joseph Goldstein notes that Hasidic opposition to Zionism in Congress Poland began immediately after the First Congress. By Nov. 1897, Polish Hasidic leaders were “denouncing it from the pulpit, by posters, and by other means. . . . The Hasidic rebbes and their followers, who [constituted] the majority of Polish Jewry, were totally opposed to the Zionist movement and employed every possible device to harm it and sabotage its activities.” Joseph Goldstein, “The Beginnings of the Zionist Movement in Congress Poland: The Victory of the Hasidim over the Zionists,” Polin 5 (1990): 118–19. 56 The lecture, frequently advertised in the pages of his Krakauer Jüdischer Zeitung, was published in Kraków in 1897 and reissued in Hamburg in 1919. 57 Marcus, Dr. Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat, 1. Marcus also quotes Hess’s very positive description of Hasidism in the introduction to his major study, Der Chassidismus, 2–4. 58 Marcus, Dr. Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat, 5. 59 Slutski’s Shivat Tsiyyon was a well-known Zionist work, first published in 1891, that attempted to prove the compatibility of Zionism with traditional Judaism. Essentially, it was a collection of letters of approbation from various rabbis, most without much authority in the rabbinic community, for the settlement idea. For a discussion of this text, see Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 177–99, as well as Salmon’s extensive introduction in its recent republication: A. Y. Slutski, Shivat Tsiyyon (Jerusalem, 1998). 60 Marcus, Dr. Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat, 8 (emphasis added). 61 According to his sister, Marcus received 43 letters from Herzl and wrote as many or more back to him. Most were lost during World War II. Aron, “Herzl and Aron Marcus,” 184. 62 Herzl to Marcus, May 4 and 8, 1896, CZA. 63 Herzl to Marcus, Aug. 19, 1897. See also Herzl to Marcus, Nov. 11, 1896. 64 See, e.g., Herzl’s famous discussion of “theocracy” in his Der Judenstaat, trans. Sylvie D’Avigdor (New York, 1988): “Shall we end by having a theocracy? No, indeed. . . . We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks. . . . Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality” (146). 65 Herzl to Marcus, May 8, 1896, CZA. 66 Herzl to Marcus, May 4, 1896, CZA. 67 Herzl wrote almost these same words in his diary, Theodor Herzls Tagebücher, 1895–1904, 196. He wrote even more bluntly to Max Nordau, chastising his friend for “driving off the Zionist rabbis” with his explicitly secularist rhetoric. “We must not dampen their spirits,” writes
[153] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[154] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
Herzl, “even if we are far from placing power in their hands.” Cited in Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History (Jerusalem, 1987), 95. 68 See, e.g., Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Jan. 13, May 13, Sept. 13, and Dec. 13, 1898, and July 1899, as well as Marcus’s letters to Herzl and his speech at the Second Zionist Congress, in which he proposed transferring the Jewish colonists in Argentina to Palestine. See particularly his scathing attack on Hirsch himself—who had just died—in his Apr. 27, 1896, letter to Herzl (CZA). Marcus mockingly calls him an “intelligent assimilationist” who made it impossible for Jews in Argentina to form any communal organization, “the vital nerve of the Jewish sense of freedom and family life,” and turned them over to the “gauchos, who rape the women and break their arms in the process.” He concludes, “Down with Argentina.” 69 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1898, p. 7. 70 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, June 13, 1898, p. 3. A previously unknown letter by Nordau to Marcus is equally obsequious. Thanking Marcus for his latest book, Nordau writes: “If I were to tell you all the things that your exceedingly strange work stimulated in terms of agreements and contradictions in me, I would need to write at least four volumes about your two. I am not saying that it would not be worth the effort. But where would I get the time? So, just this one comment: You amaze me with your erudition. That is not a reference to your caftan—I have already learned that such clothing never precludes deepest and broadest knowledge. I am just thinking about your unworldly [weltentfernt] Podgórze and ask myself with astonishment how you are able, from that position, to maintain . . . such complete currency on philosophy, science and belles lettres” (Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Feb. 13, 1898, p. 13). 71 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 300. 72 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, June 1899, pp. 1–2. 73 Ibid., May 1899, p. 2. 74 Luz, Parallels Meet, 140–41. Abraham Isaac Kook even suggested that Herzl might be the Messiah son of Joseph, preparing the world for the ultimate redemption by Messiah son of David. 75 Chaim Bloch, Mi natan li-meshissah Ya‘akov ve-Yisra’el le-vozezim? (New York, 1957), 85. 76 Ibid., 97. Just before this article went to press, I discovered a serious accusation of forgery against Bloch. For details, see Marc Shapiro, http://seforim.blogspot.com/2010/04/marc-shapiro-more-on-chaim -bloch.html. 77 See, e.g., Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Dec. 13, 1898, pp. 10–14. 78 See, e.g., ibid., Feb. 13, 1898, p. 14. 79 Ibid., Aug. 13, 1898, p. 3. 80 Almog, Zionism and History, 94–95. 81 Luz, Parallels Meet, 140–41. 82 On Mandelstamm’s “open letter to the rabbis” and the reaction to it, see Luz, Parallels Meet, 206–9, and Almog, Zionism and History, 198–99.
Luz credits Mandelstamm’s letter with sparking the publication of ’Or La-yesharim. 83 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Mar. 29, 1898, p. 3. 84 Ibid. 85 Rabbi Samuel Mohilewer had written similarly in Shivat Tsiyyon that secular Jews living in ’Erets Yisra’el were preferable to religiously observant Jews abroad. Mohilewer’s article, however, led to a concerted effort among haredim (Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews) to discredit him post humously. Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 60. Marcus’s article never generated any such reaction. 86 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Dec. 13, 1898, p. 10. 87 Ibid., July 13, 1898, p. 1. 88 Ibid. See also ibid., Dec. 13, 1898, p. 12, where Marcus mocks Reform Jews for violating all of Torah but then hypocritically attacking Zionism as heretical. For a critique of German rabbis who opposed Zionism, see his long retort to them in his newspaper’s first issue. Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1898, pp. 7–10. 89 Ibid., July 13, 1898, p. 3. 90 Ibid. 91 Gelber, Toledot, 380, 783–84. Gelber translates the letter differently in those two places. Unfortunately, the original was not included in the packet of letters sent to me by the Central Zionist Archives. 92 Marcus to Herzl, May 18, 1898, CZA. Herzl wrote his response on May 22. 93 See Mohilewer’s address to the First Zionist Congress in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia, 1997), 402. 94 For a lengthy discourse by Marcus on the continuing mitzvah of settling the land of Israel “in our day,” based on a variety of talmudic and posttalmudic sources (particularly Yehudah Halevi’s Kuzari), see Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Mar. 29, 1898, pp. 2–4. 95 See Yerushalmi Yoma 1:1 (5a). My thanks to Yehuda Kurtzer for this reference. 96 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Mar. 29, 1898, p. 3. See also ibid., Dec. 13, 1898, pp. 10–13. 97 On this campaign, see Yosef Salmon, “Ha-polmos ‘al ’etrogei korfu ve-’etrogei ’erets yisra’el, 1875–1891,” Zion 65 (2000): 75–106. On the campaign in Galicia, see Shanes, “Papers for the Folk,” 182–83. 98 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Aug. 13, 1898, p. 13. The advertisement was posted by Marcus’s son Shlomo, who explained how he came to launch the firm and described a groundswell of rabbinic support for it. In 1900, Shlomo published a 48-page booklet of rabbinic letters praising etrogim grown in ’Erets Yisra’el, Peri ‘ets hadar: Kovets mi-kitvei ge’onei dorenu be-shevach etrogei ’erets ha-kodesh (Kraków, 1900). Although deferential to his father, Shlomo wrote that he launched the firm on his own initiative when the existing merchants refused his requests to carry etrogim from ’Erets Yisra’el.
[155] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[156] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
99 Shlomo Marcus launched his firm in mid-1898. See the announcement in Ha-maggid, June 9, 1898, p. 180, where the paper explicitly notes that selling produce from ’Erets Yisra’el “will awaken also here the love for the land of our fathers [be-yeter s’et uve-yeter ‘oz].” 100 Ha-maggid, Aug. 11, 1898, p. 254. See also ibid., Aug. 4, 1898, p. 245. Fuchs’s conflict with Marcus did not prevent his newspaper from announcing the launch of the Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung with favorable reviews. See Ha-maggid, Jan. 20, 1898, p. 22, and Feb. 25, 1898, p. 63, both of which included detailed contents of Marcus’s new periodical. 101 For a discussion of the difference between “ethnic” and “civic” nationalisms, categories first mapped by Hans Kohn, see Anthony Smith, Nationalism (Cambridge, Engl., 2001), 36–42. 102 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1898, pp. 7–8. Marcus tried to prove his point by noting how the American nation was pulling away from Europe and becoming more of a “copper-colored” race. 103 See, e.g., Marcus’s long lead article supporting the temporary settlement of one million Jews in Cyprus, whose conditions he surveyed. Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Oct. 1899, pp. 2–5. 104 See the works cited in notes 10 and 11 above. 105 Marcus to Herzl, May 6, 1896, CZA. Herzl refers to the letter in his diary, Theodor Herzls Tagebücher, 1895–1904, 397. The quote is also given in Bloch, Mi natan, 112. 106 Theodor Herzl’s Tagebücher, 1895–1904, 578. Chaim Bloch claimed that Herzl offered to elevate the rebbe to a future bishopric, but, as noted above, he has been accused of forgery. Bloch, Mi natan, 112. 107 One of the rebbe’s attendants prevented the letter’s carrier from meeting with the rebbe. J. Rappoport, “Mikhtav me-’et Theodor Herzl ’el ha-rebbe mi-Chortkov,” Zion 4 (July 1939): 351–52. Herzl’s letter is reprinted there in full. 108 Die Welt, Dec. 17, 1897, p. 13. Gelber claims that Marcus also visited the younger Friedmann in December 1897, impressing him with rhetoric about the Zionist fight against assimilation and support for the revitali zation of the Hebrew language, but he does not cite any source for this. Gelber, Toledot, 783. Y. Alfasi writes (citing Gelber) that Herzl himself met with the younger Friedmann. Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 97. 109 “Practical” Zionism, a term that would only be introduced in the early twentieth century, supported the immediate settlement of Palestine. In contrast, Herzl’s “political” Zionism sought to achieve international political sanction for the Jews’ state before beginning immigration. 110 See the review in Jüdisches Wochenblatt, Jan. 24, 1895, p. 6. The book was similar to Slutski’s Shivat Tsiyyon but consisted exclusively of texts from Galician rabbis. 111 Gelber, Toledot, 324–25. Marcus’s son Solomon was elected secretary of the new Podgórze branch. Die Welt, June 25, 1897, p. 11. 112 Die Welt, June 4, 1897, pp. 9–10.
113 See the report of its Dec. 1896 meeting in Ha-maggid, Jan. 7, 1897, pp. 6–7, reprinted in Gelber, Toledot, 337. 114 Gelber, Toledot, 326. See the report of that conference in Ha-maggid, Jan. 13, 1898, pp. 5–6, and Die Welt, Dec. 31, 1897, p. 10. 115 Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 29, and Gelber, Toledot, 356, 358. 116 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Jan. 13, 1898, p. 14, and Feb. 13, 1898, p. 5; Ha-maggid, Jan. 6, 1898, p. 5. See also Salz’s memoirs in 50 lat sjonismu (Tarnow, 1935). Efforts to secure other Hasidic leaders of Friedmann’s stature—particularly Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam, the rebbe of Sieniawa (and son of Rabbi Chaim Halberstam, the first rebbe of Sanz)—all failed. Gelber, Toledot, 345. 117 Ha-meliz, Apr. 29, 1898, p. 2, cited in Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 297. 118 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Feb. 13, 1898, pp. 5–6. 119 Ha-maggid, Feb. 3, 1898, p. 40. 120 The Sh’elah, Isaiah Horowitz’s Shenei luchot ha-berit, was first published in 1648 and quickly became one of the most reprinted and influential kabbalistic works. 121 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Feb. 13, 1898, p. 6. 122 Ha-maggid, June 9, 1898, p. 180. (The paper incorrectly calls the group Yeshuv ’Erets Yisra’el.) On June 16, the president clarified that the group had not “declared its independence” from the ZO, as initially reported, but simply declared its support for the Jerusalem society. Hamaggid, June 16, 1898, p. 188. 123 Gelber, Toledot, 368. ’Ahavat Tsiyyon surged briefly as an independent association, but it fizzled out in 1900. 124 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Sept. 1899, p. 2. 125 Ibid., June 13, 1898, p. 5. 126 Luz, Parallels Meet, 147–48. 127 Almog, Zionism and History, 101; Luz, Parallels Meet, 149; Salmon, Religion and Zionism, xvi. 128 Luz, Parallels Meet, 110, 124–28; Almog, Zionism and History, 188–93. 129 Ha-maggid, Aug. 4, 1898, p. 245. Marcus’s rival, the modern preacher Yehoshua Thon, lost election for the third and final delegate spot. 130 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Sept. 1899, p. 1. 131 On Ehrenpreis and Thon, particularly with regard to the “culture” question, see Almog, Zionism and History, esp. 114–15, 150–53. 132 Bader Papers, 4. Despite his position, Thon was an ordained rabbi. Marcus later reported that Thon received the title “rabbi” in order to legalize his ability to marry congregants of his temple—but only congregants of his temple—as part of a community compromise between the Hasidim and the “Reform party.” Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Apr. 1899, p. 12. 133 The authority given to the rebbe was also sharply attacked by Ahad Ha‘am, Yehoshua Thon, and Micha Berdyczewski. Almog, Zionism and History, 168–69. 134 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Mar. 13, 1898, p. 1. Marcus mocked Ehrenpre-
[157] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[158] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
is’s misuse of a talmudic idiom and then sarcastically derided the journal for overreacting to the rebbe’s authority of selecting the religious leaders of ’Ahavat Tsiyyon’s proposed settlement. Salz himself attacked Ehrenpreis in the second issue of his group’s newsletter, to which Ehrenpreis responded angrily—accusing him, among other things, of not knowing Hebrew—in Ha-maggid, Mar. 17, 1898, 84–6. Salz responds to this in the subsequent issue of Ha-maggid, March 23, 1898, pp. 92–93. 135 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Aug. 13, 1898, p. 1. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 See, e.g., Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Aug. 13, Sept. 13, and Dec. 13, 1898. 139 Ibid., August 13, 1898, pp. 3–5. 140 Ibid., p. 2. 141 Ibid., pp. 10–12. The Dorshei Shalom Tsiyyon society could boast 700 men (women were not admitted into the hall) at their Dec. 1898 rally for settling Palestine, though most Hasidim remained hostile to the group. One newspaper report of the event noted that, among most Hasidim, being labeled a Zionist was sufficient to be disqualified from serving as a kosher witness. Ha-melits, Dec. 23, 1898, p. 2. 142 Luz, Parallels Meet, 127. 143 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, Sept. 13, 1898, p. 2. 144 Ibid., Mar. 29, 1898, p. 14. The article was based on correspondence from Kraków, but its inclusion in the newspaper without response certainly reflects Marcus’s editorial hand. 145 Ibid., June 13, 1898, p. 13. 146 Ibid., 14. 147 According to Marcus, Herzl told him at the time that the Zionists’ long-sought charter only depended on the full capitalization of their bank and thus assigned high priority to the mission. Marcus to Herzl, May 29, 1900, CZA. 148 Cohen, “Ha-’admorim me-chortkov,” 68–69. Weiss, elected president of ’Ahavat Tsiyyon in 1897, was apparently a personal friend of Marcus. His contribution to Shlomo Marcus’s booklet opposing Greek etrogim is preceded by a personal note of greeting to Shlomo’s father: “Ha-rav, Shelita.” S. Marcus, Peri ‘ets hadar, 17. 149 Marcus to Herzl, Feb. 11, 1900, CZA. 150 Gelber, Toledot, 785, quoting a letter from Marcus dated Feb. 19, 1900. This letter does not appear in the packet of correspondence provided to me by the CZA. 151 Marcus to Herzl, Feb. 26, 1900, CZA. Marcus never realized his intention of moving to Palestine. 152 Gelber, Toledot, 786–87. Gelber calls this letter Marcus’s “swan song” for his Zionist activity, but, as I discuss in the text below, he remained active for some time afterward. The letter, reprinted in part by Gelber, was not included in the packet of correspondences provided to me by the CZA.
153 On Marcus’s view of the Jewish Colonial Trust, see Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, May 1899, p. 11, and July 1899, pp. 2, 13. 154 Gelber, Toledot, 784–87; Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 36; Cohen, “Ha-’admorim me-chortkov,” 68. Gelber includes a transcript of a letter from Friedmann’s secretary to Marcus on the good prospects of this rabbinical assembly. 155 Gelber, Toledot, 786–87. Yosef Salmon, among others, repeats the claim; see his “Zionism and Anti-Zionism in Eastern Europe,” 37. 156 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 306; Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, 14–19. 157 Die Welt, Apr. 13, 1900, p. 9. The wedding was on Apr. 8. 158 Marcus to Herzl, Aug. 12, 1900, CZA. 159 Marcus to Herzl, Mar. 1, 1898, CZA. 160 All quotations in this paragraph are from Marcus’s letters to Herzl, May 27 and 29, 1900, CZA. 161 Herzl to Marcus, June 12, 1900, CZA. 162 Marcus’s correspondence with Herzl suggests that he may have published the issue in order to receive the second installment of his subvention from the ZO. Herzl promised to renew the support once he received verification of the journal restarting, and Marcus’s penultimate letter to Herzl is a brief note—on Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung letterhead—enclosed with advanced proofs of the work and requesting the money. Herzl to Marcus, June 12, 1900, and Marcus to Herzl, June 22, 1900. 163 Krakauer Jüdische Zeitung, July 1900, p. 3. 164 Ibid. Of course, no supplements would ever be produced as this was the last issue. 165 Segel, He-chasid me-Hamburg, 159. 166 Marcus to Herzl, Aug. 12, 1900, CZA. (The archive transcript leaves off the year, but the handwritten letter—and certainly the context—dates the letter quite clearly.) 167 Ibid. 168 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 364. Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam, the rebbe of Sienawa (and son of Chaim Halberstam, the first rebbe of Sanz), had long opposed both the ZO and ’Ahavat Tsiyyon. Copies of his letters, both general and personal, against the latter organization appear in Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 29–30. 169 Alfasi, Ha-chasidut ve-shivat Tsiyyon, 36. Both Israel Friedmann and his father before him stated that, if 500,000 Hasidim would move to the land of Israel, the Messiah would come. The younger Friedmann continued to lament the failure of the Zionists to acquiesce to traditionalist demands and thereby, in his mind, secure their support. As late as 1913, he described Zionism as an “honorable and precious matter” but one that was spoiled by the Zionists’ brazen irreligious behavior, which pushed away the Jewish masses. Jacob Mezah, Zikhronot, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1936), 3: 56. The comment was a response to Mezah’s surprise at the rebbe’s daughter’s deep knowledge of—and obvious sympathy for—contemporary Zionism.
[159] Ahron Marcus
•
Joshua Shanes
[160] Jewish Social Studies
•
Vol. 16 No. 3
170 Jacob Rosenheim, Zikhronot (New York, 1979), 142. Marcus’s other recorded speech called for the organization to address the problem of girls’ education in Galicia, where the daughters of Hasidic families filled the seats of the public schools—and received no Jewish education at all—while the sons went to traditional Jewish schools. Ibid., 165–66. Once again, this may reflect the impact of Czortkow. The rebbe’s own daughter revealed a magnificent command of secular and modern Hebrew literature, including biblical criticism, in her conversation with the Zionist Russian rabbi Jacob Mezah in 1913. Mezah, Zikhronot, 3: 55. 171 Eliezer Margolit, “Ha-tenu‘ah ha-tsiyyonit be-chortkov,” in Austridan, Sefer yizkor le-hantsachat kedoshei kehillat Chortkov, 91. See also Jüdische Zeitung (Vienna), May 11, 1907, p. 7. On Marcus’s friendly relationship with Mizrahi, see his obituary in the Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt, which also praised him as a colleague for his contributions to the Mizrahi-affiliated paper over the last decade of his life. 172 See, e.g., Yisroel Friedman, The Rebbes of Chortkov (Brooklyn, N.Y., 2003), 300–304. This descendent of the Friedmann dynasty acknowledges the court’s strong support of settling the land of Israel, which he credits for the inclusion of this program in the platform of ’Agudat Yisra’el, but emphasizes the rebbes’ absolute opposition to secular Zionism from the beginning of that movement. See also the Hasidic hagiography Dos malkhes’dige hsides, originally published in 1937, which invents a tale of Joseph Bloch coming to Czortkow as a representative of Herzl to convince Israel Friedmann to accept the honorary presidency of the Zionist Organization. (Apparently he means just before the First Congress.) The “young rebbe” immediately recognized Zionism for the heresy that it was, and when Bloch returned a second time after the congress, the rebbe quickly dismissed him. Sh. Nisnzohn, Dos malkhes’dige hsides (n.p. [Israel], 1972), 251. 173 Years after his death, rumors spread that Herzl had visited the court of Czortkow and met with the elder rebbe, who allegedly described the presence of God on Herzl’s face, blessing his “holy work.” Israel Friedmann emphatically denied this to Rabbi Joseph Bloch in a visit around 1920, recorded in the memoirs of Chaim Bloch, also in attendance. “He [Herzl] was not in Czortkow,” Friedmann declared, “and his feet did not cross the threshold of our home!” Bloch, Mi natan, 19. This is apparently true, though Friedmann’s attitude is anachronistic. 174 Salmon, Religion and Zionism, 301. Elsewhere Salmon does identify early 1900 as the turning point when Herzl lost any hope of recruiting eastern European Orthodoxy. Salmon, “Herzl and Orthodox Jewry,” in Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert Wistrich (Jerusalem, 1999), 304–6. However, even here he jumps back to the Second Congress as the key event that forced the withdrawal of traditionalists from the Zionist organization. He is also unaware of Marcus maintaining his Zionist connections beyond that time.
Contributors [161] EFRAIM DAVIDI teaches Modern and Latin American History at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (davidi@post .tau.ac.il). He is the author and editor of several books in Hebrew, including Che Guevara: A Story of a Revolutionary (2004) and Labor, Capital, and Power: The Worker’s Movement in Argentina, 1966–1976 (2008). SHIRLI GILBERT is Karten Lecturer in Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton (
[email protected]). She is the author of Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (2005) and has published widely on the subjects of music, memory, and resistance in relation to both the Holocaust and apartheid South Africa. ROY GREENWALD is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (rgreenwald26@ gmail.com). His dissertation examines Avot Yeshurun’s idiosyncratic language as an expression of poetic nomadism. His publications include translations from Yiddish, German, and French poetry and prose into Hebrew. RAANAN REIN is Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University and Director of its S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies (
[email protected]). His most recent books are In the Shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the Second Line of Argentina’s Populist Movement (2008) and Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on History, Ethnicity and Diaspora (2010). JOSHUA SHANES is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston (
[email protected]). He has published articles on Jewish politics and culture in East Central Europe. His book on Jewish nationalism in Habsburg Galicia is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. STEFAN VOGT is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for German Studies of Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (
[email protected]). He is the author of Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie: Die sozial demokratische Junge Rechte 1918–1945 (2006) and is currently working on a book about German Zionism’s confrontation with German nationalism.
