A History of Zionism (51 page)

But the ‘synthesis’ was not quite as unassailable as his followers wanted to believe. There were internal inconsistencies in Borokhovism, and in some vital respects it simply did not conform to realities. Borokhov was far too intelligent to try to provide a vulgar Marxist interpretation of antisemitism in purely economic terms. His analysis was remarkably like Pinsker’s, for he regarded it basically as a socio-psychological phenomenon. As for the future prospects of the Jewish people, Borokhov was not quite so pessimistic as the author of Autoemanzipation. The Inquisition and mass expulsions, he declared, were not likely to come back. Perhaps there was, after all, progress in history. But the Jews could not passively wait and accept pogroms, the hatred and contempt of their neighbours, as something natural and inevitable. They could not rely on progress, for if the angel in man had made progress, so had the devil.
*
Borokhov had always belittled the romantic, mystical element in Zionism. The essence of his doctrine was that Palestine would be settled and built up quite independently of the longings and desires of the Zionists. But this was one of the weakest points in his argument: Zionism shorn of its mystical element was unthinkable, and the idea that Palestine could be built up without the enthusiasm and selfless devotion of thousands of young idealists was as remote from realities as the belief that the revolution in Russia would break out irrespective of the subjective factor, i.e. the existence of a revolutionary party. Both Borokhov and Lenin needed a
deus ex machina
to break through the orthodoxy of their own constructions. However much opposed they were in principle to romanticism, they needed a myth, and also a vanguard, for neither the Russian proletariat nor the Jewish masses were likely to produce unaided that vital measure of political consciousness required to lead them along the right path.

Borokhovism was an interesting attempt to combine and coordinate the two ideologies which, more than any others, attracted the young Jewish intelligentsia of the day. It became a kind of rationalised religion, giving spiritual comfort and confidence to thousands of young men who were uneasy about the claim of orthodox Marxists that Zionism and revolutionary Socialism were incompatible. In that generation it was almost
de rigueur
to be a Socialist and a revolutionary, to believe in historical materialism and the revolutionary mission of the industrial proletariat. Kautsky’s writings were regarded by Russian and Jewish Social Democrats for many years with the same awe that religious believers showed for holy writ. Only a few intrepid spirits outside the Marxist camp, such as Idelson, the editor of
Rassvet
, dared to raise doubts: did Kautsky really have the answer to the national question? Would a change in the social system necessarily solve the national question, or did not such an assumption, far from being based on materialism, introduce a subjective, romantic element? Were not Kautsky’s
obiter dicta
against Zionism reminiscent of the bourgeois arguments against Socialism?
*

There were other weighty reasons against mechanically projecting concepts established elsewhere on to the Russian-Jewish scene. ‘Proletariat’, ‘class struggle’, and ‘class consciousness’ meant one thing in Bialystok and another in Berlin. Jewish industrial workers were not the sons and daughters of peasants who had moved to town. They usually hailed from lower middle class families whose economic situation had deteriorated. They took a lively interest in their work, and expected to be treated like relations - at least like poor relations - by the factory owners, who were often their co-religionists. Many of them regarded their proletarian existence as temporary. As soon as possible they would try to become independent, establishing small workshops of their own, or take some examination which would qualify them for a clerical job or even to become a teacher. They had the traditional Jewish thirst for education, and working class parents wanted their children to have a chance to improve their status in society. Jewish workers lacked neither solidarity nor militancy, but their whole mentality differed from that of the rank-and-file working men of other nations.

The Second Aliya

The young men and women who began arriving in Palestine from Russia between 1904 and 1906, and who constituted the ‘second aliya’ (immigration wave) were not ‘natural workers’ but idealists, and on occasion felt themselves for that reason very much inferior. Yet ‘natural workers’, interested mainly in higher wages and better working conditions, would hardly have opted for what the critics of Zionism used to call
‘dos gepeigerte Land’
- the country which had died. The new arrivals were the sons and daughters of lower middle class families from Russia and Poland, many of them in their teens, full of enthusiasm to build a new Socialist society and at the same time quite unsure of themselves. Would they be up to the great assignment awaiting them in a strange country and in difficult working conditions? Yosef Baratz, later one of the founder-members of Degania, the first of the kvutzot, relates how he wept bitter tears when as a youngster of seventeen he returned home after a hard day’s work; physical labour in these conditions was so difficult, would he ever become a real worker?
*
The example of the Biluim who settled in Palestine in the 1880s and 1890s was not exactly encouraging. They too had come to work the land. They too had been radical in their political outlook. Ussishkin and Chlenov, who later became the leaders of Russian Zionism had not been accepted as members because of their ‘bourgeois background’. But their settlements had changed out of recognition since the early romantic and heroic days. The Biluim were now small hacienderos, fairly well-to-do farmers by Palestinian standards. They were, as far as the newcomers were concerned, the employers, the class enemy. Before the arrival of the second wave of immigrants there had been a few shortlived workers’ organisations, a few isolated strikes, but the real history of the labour movement in Palestine begins only with the arrival of the Homel group of pioneers in January 1904, the harbinger of a new period in the history of the settlement of Palestine: 1,230 new immigrants left Odessa in 1905 for Palestine, 3,459 the year after, and 1,750 in 1907. Altogether some 35-40,000 new immigrants belonging to this category arrived in Palestine between the beginning of 1904 and the outbreak of the First World War.

If a reporter or a social scientist had asked the new arrivals in the port of Jaffa the reason for their coming, he would no doubt have received a great many conflicting explanations. But there were certain common factors. These were the years of the Russo-Japanese war, the first Russian revolution, and a fresh wave of pogroms. Many thought that the revolutionary movement would bring freedom to Russia and at long last liberate the persecuted Jewish minority. But others, like the young David Grin (Ben Gurion), instinctively felt that whatever the revolution would achieve for Russia, it almost certainly did not mean the end of the Jewish people’s tribulations. They came to Palestine out of despair, to quote again David Grin. They had despaired of the Jewish diaspora, of Socialism, but also of Zionism as preached and practised by its official representatives in the diaspora. They regarded Eretz Israel as the end of the road, the last dwelling place.

There was a strong romantic-mystical element in the young pioneers, despite the fact that many professed a belief in historical materialism. It was a left-wing Socialist who wrote that there was a mysterious thread linking Modi’in (the home of the Maccabees) and Sejera (the new agricultural settlement in lower Galilee).
*
Massada, where in Roman times the Jews had fought to the last man rather than surrender, again became a great symbol. But this is not to say that apocalyptic forebodings dominated their thoughts. On the contrary, they were full of vitality and, in the beginning at least, of optimism. They were taking possession again of the homeland which had been lost to the Jewish people as a result of a series of historical misfortunes. They wanted to put down roots as quickly and as deeply as possible, and in countless excursions on horseback, or more often riding a donkey or on foot, they explored their new homeland. For many of them it was like revisiting an ancestral home of which they had so often heard.
†

The second immigration was by no means a homogenous group, even though almost all were young, unmarried, and came from Russia. They did not even have a common language. The main contingent came from White Russia, eastern Poland, and Lithuania. They had all grown up in a traditional Jewish environment and spoke Yiddish, but all knew at least some Hebrew. For them the Bible and Jewish literature had been a stronger formative influence than Socialist doctrine. But there were also substantial numbers from south Russia, the sons and daughters of assimilated families, higher up on the social ladder, who knew only Russian. Their grandfathers had served in the Russian army and their families had been permitted to move to areas outside the pale of settlement. These young men and women had become Zionists as a result of the Russian revolution and the pogroms, and Jewish traditions were often alien to them. Language was at first a major barrier. In the early assemblies, translations from Hebrew into Yiddish and Russian and vice versa had to be provided. Trumpeldor, the one-armed hero of the Russo-Japanese war, did not know a word of Hebrew when he arrived in Jaffa, nor did Rahel, who was later to win renown as a poet. Berl Katznelson had some knowledge of the language, but he vowed not to use any other in conversation even if it meant weeks of silence. Ben Gurion’s rise to prominence began a few days after his arrival when he made a rousing speech at a workers’ meeting in fluent and powerful Hebrew - an unusual event in Poale Zion circles, where Yiddish was still widely used at the time.

There was a blatant discrepancy between what the pioneers expected and what they found upon their arrival at the guest house of Chaim Bloch in Jaffa, the first station for most of them. There were the usual difficulties facing new immigrants all over the globe. But there were other, more specific problems: for Alexander Said, who had been born in Siberia and was to become one of the most famous
shomrim
(watchmen), the trouble began while he was still aboard the ship; he had no valid entry visa and was arrested by the Turkish authorities. Fortunately he had a silver watch, the only heirloom from his father, which sufficed to buy him off.
*
On the day of his arrival Berl Katznelson met in Jaffa a close friend who was about to leave the country, which did not exactly help to raise his spirits. Everything was strange and unfamiliar - the people, the landscape, the whole atmosphere. Even ardent Zionists like A.A. Gordon and Moshe Smilansky later admitted that it took them years to get accustomed to their new surroundings. Deep inside they still felt a spiritual attachment to the Russian landscape, its rivers, fields and forests. They did not dislike the Palestinian scenery, they simply felt that it was not part of themselves, that they were still visitors in a strange country. Paraphrasing Yehuda Halevy, the medieval Jewish poet, they could say that their body was in Eretz Israel, but their soul in some ways was still in Russia.

Living conditions were incredibly primitive even by eastern European standards. The newcomers lived in tents or miserable huts. They had to put up with malaria, snakes, scorpions, various bugs, overseers who made work hell, and a cultural environment which was either Levantine or reminded them of the
shtetl
which they had left behind. There was not enough work, the Jewish peasants of Petah Tiqva, Rishon Lezion and Zikhron Ya’akov preferring Arab to Jewish labour, the Arab worker being cheaper, more experienced and less likely to engage in argument. Frequently the newcomers were told that they had been gravely mistaken in assuming that they were needed in Eretz Israel and would be well advised to return home as soon as possible. Was it prudent in these conditions to encourage further immigration? While Yosef Witkin, a teacher and early settler, published a call to Jewish youth in eastern Europe to come to the help of their people and to serve it, Poale Zion doubted the wisdom of such manifestos. Should one artificially stimulate immigration rather than wait patiently for the natural and inevitable processes which Borokhov had predicted and which would bring both capitalists and workers to Palestine?

The pioneers of 1905 were the strangest workers the world had ever seen. Manual labour for them was not a necessary evil but an absolute moral value, a remedy to cure the Jewish people of its social and national ills. They shared the admiration of the Russian Populists for the
muzhik
, while at the same time, with the Marxists, they regarded the class-conscious industrial worker as an ideal figure. Those who for various reasons could not do manual work felt themselves inferior to their comrades and discriminated against.
*
They were immensely proud of their independence. Any help from home was rejected, and even accepting an invitation to a meal from a Jewish farmer was frowned upon. When one such farmer paid his Jewish workers eight piastres instead of the seven agreed upon as their daily wage, they angrily sent their wage packet back, accepting it grudgingly only after having been assured that they were paid more not because they were Jews but because they had been doing outstanding work. They also insisted on being hired labourers. The establishment of agricultural settlements of their own was ruled out because they did not want to become farmers and in doing so turn their back on the working class. The experience of the Biluim acted as a deterrent.

The demands they made on themselves were impossibly high, and the initial enthusiasm of 1904-6 was bound to be followed by a deep crisis. The second immigration wave consisted mainly of individuals rather than groups. Not a few had come to the country by mere accident, having joined friends or relations without exactly knowing where they were going or why. Some, the ‘Japanese’, had joined the exodus because they preferred Palestine to service in the Russian army in wartime. There were not a few of those semi-intellectual drifters described by Brenner in his novels: the first to arrive in the country, and also the first to leave, forever restless and dissatisfied, Ahasuerus’s grandchildren. Despair set in because the volume of immigration had fallen far short of expectations. The Homelites, for instance, who had been the very first to arrive in 1904, had firmly believed that they were just the vanguard of a great mass movement and that many hundreds if not thousands of fellow Zionists from their home town would soon join them.
*
They felt betrayed and isolated when within a year or two they realised that the main body of the army would not follow them. The great majority, 80 per cent or even more, of those who had come in 1904-6 to build Eretz Israel left the country within a few months, returning to Russia or going on to America. But those who remained eventually became the nucleus of Labour Zionism. It was they who were to provide in later years the leadership of the Socialist parties, the Zionist movement, and the State of Israel.