The Heralds of Zionism as Theological Revolutionaries

In historiographical research, there is an approach that perceives the ideologues who preceded the Hovevei Zion movement (1881) and the Zionist movement (1896) as “heralds of Zionism”. These ideologues operated, or at least proposed the idea of the Jews’ return to the Land of Israel and establishment a political entity in the Land, beginning from the 1860s. The researchers are divided, however, on the identification of the heralds. Some locate them even earlier, in the 17th century, while others deny their very existence. This article wishes to claim that the heralds of Zionism were Orthodox rabbis, such as R. Kalisher, R. Alkalai, R. Friedland, R. Guttmacher, R. Bibas, and R. Natonek, who operated in the early half of the 19th century and transformed the Jewish theology that advocated a passive-spiritual-Divine redemption into an active-practical-natural redemption. For this purpose, it is necessary to immigrate to the Land of Israel and cultivate the land. They contended that once the People of Israel would do so, the redemption would arrive.

‘The Most Valuable National Fund’

At the heart of Zionists’ nation-building project was the care and education of Jewish children in East-Central Europe. Young people were particularly affected by the war, often having lost family and home. Zionists saw them as the future of the nation, and the struggle for their well-being and education came to be a key element of their efforts during the war. This chapter shows how Zionists built orphanages and kindergartens, schools, and summer camps, and how these institutions functioned on a day-to day basis. These efforts in particular demonstrate that the war was also a time of great opportunity and experimentation for education activists. They tried to apply new pedagogical theories within their institutions based on their ideas of Jewish childhood and its role in producing upright, nationally conscious Jews who were the future of the nation. Gender relations are particularly key in this context: young women played an ever-increasing role in the movement through their involvement with childcare and education. The war opened up a range of new possibilities for young people, and particularly for young women to attain hitherto unheard-of roles within the Zionist movement. These changing gender and age relations within the Zionist movement mirrored changed relations within the wider society, due to the pressure of the war, and shaped the movement for decades to come.

Introduction

During the First World War and its aftermath, the Zionist movement in many regions managed to evolve from relatively small groups, primarily of bourgeois intellectuals, to become a mass movement that in many cases came to dominate Jewish political and social life. This meteoric rise can be attributed to the hard, everyday work of Zionist activists in the communities of East-Central Europe. The introduction identifies the key questions at the heart of this development and anticipates the main problems and themes of the book. In order to situate the events of 1914–20 in a wider regional and historical context, central aspects of Jewish life in East-Central Europe before the outbreak of the First World War are explained. The different legal, economic, and cultural conditions under which the actors of the book lived produced conflicting responses to many of the main challenges posed by modernity—nationalism, antisemitism, economic transformation, and mass migration. One of these responses was Zionism, which from Lithuania to Austria presented itself in many different forms. The introduction discusses the various trends in the Zionist movement, the role of Palestine in activists’ thinking, and their engagement in their local communities––questions that would be central in the years of war and revolution.

Conclusion

The Conclusion revisits some of the communities in which Zionists had worked during the war, showing how they were transformed in those years. The numerical growth of the Zionist movement and electoral victories in many places throughout the region speak to the transformation of the Jewish social and political landscape, and to the mass appeal of the Zionist movement and its ideas. Furthermore, Zionist nation-building meant the establishment of a vast national infrastructure, ranging from newspapers to schools, kindergartens, social centres, and so on, that came to be key features of Jewish society. These ‘outcomes’ show that it was concrete activism rather than ‘big ideas’ that made the Zionist movement attractive to the Jewish population, but also that this activism could assume very different forms, depending on local context. Looking at the diverse forms Zionist nation-building took in communities throughout the region highlights the necessity to rethink the ‘big story’ of Zionism in this period. Rather than a single process connected to wider events, it involved many different small, everyday struggles that activists and communities fought throughout the region. Not one but many Zionist ideas flourished in these years. This was the way in which Zionism experienced its great breakthrough, becoming a leading force in Jewish social and political life in the decades to come.

6. The Promised Land

“The promised land” looks at the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century in its commitment to create a Jewish state that could not only normalize diaspora Jewish life but also establish a national literature. It meditates on the work of Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nakhman Bialik, Sh. Y. Agnon, and Amos Oz as canonical voices in Israeli literature. It is worth reflecting on Palestinian literature written in Hebrew, as in Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, and ask the question: ought it to be considered part of Jewish literature? Israeli literature, despite argument to the contrary, is another facet of modern Jewish literature in the diaspora.

A Leap over History

This article argues that Vladimir Jabotinsky envisioned ‘leaping over history’ to immediately achieve his goal of creating a Jewish majority in Eretz Israel. On several occasions he tried to break with evolutionary time and make events bend to his will. My arguments show him to be a revolutionary political thinker similar to Lenin, Stalin, or Mussolini, rather than a gradualist and parliamentarian. Looking at his career from this angle permits one to create a different timeline that pits Jabotinsky’s feverish activity against the slow progress of the Zionist movement.

Eri Jabotinsky, mathematician and politician: a short biography

Despite the fact that Eri Jabotinsky (1910–1969) published only few (i.e. fourteen) mathematical papers, some of them had a remarkable influence in iteration theory. But also his life was remakable. Eri was the son of the famous Zionist Revisionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Eri Jabotinsky was active in the Zionist movement and later as parlamentarian in the Knesset. Here we give an outline of his live and a complete list of his publications.

Zionist Organizations in Voronezh

The chapter is based on materials from the archives and investigations of the OGPU of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The last years of the XIX century and the first twentieth century became a time of rapid development and strengthening of the Zionist movement in Russia developed rapidly. In 1902, over a thousand disparate Zionist organizations merged into the Russian Zionist Organization (RNO). In this article, we will consider the processes taking place in a separate region of Russia - the Central Black Earth Region (CCO). Voronezh became the center of the Central Council in 1928.

Development of the Education of Galician Jews at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries as Exemplified by the City of Lviv

In 19th and the beginning of 20th century Galician Jews left step by step the isolated world of traditional culture for the opened worldwide culture. At the start of this way, they knew only one path of life, based on many centuries of tradition, but, at the end, it provided many paths to self-realization. Some of them were still devoted, other secular, some of them felt Jews, others felt Poles of Mosaic faith or Germans of Mosaic faith, some were involved in the Zionist movement, others in socialism. Many of them considered Galicia to be their own little Motherland and manifested the features of local patriotism. It was possible thanks to the modernization of their lifestyle, and public education turned out to be one of the most important factor in this process.