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April 24, 2009
Pinsker, an early political Zionist
Physician dreamed of, pushed for, a Jewish homeland in Palestine in late 19th century.
EUGENE KAELLIS
The year 1881 was both tragic and decisive for millions of Russian and Polish Jews. Czar Alexander II, "the Liberator," who abolished serfdom and had displayed relative moderation in all areas, was, after a reign of 25 years, assassinated. His son and successor, Alexander III, czar until his death in 1894, was quite different. A harsh and consistent ideologue, he had no sympathy for Jews or reformers.
In 1881, within weeks of his father's assassination, a series of extremely violent pogroms, almost certainly organized, or at least abetted by his officials, broke out. They involved close to 250 Jewish communities in south and southwestern Russia. Thousands of Jewish homes were sacked, many women raped, hundreds of Jews brutally assaulted and many killed. There was no interference by police or soldiers and no punishment meted out to the perpetrators. Pogroms in Kishinev, Gomel, Odessa and many other cities and towns continued from time to time, especially when the czar faced a political crisis, as Czar Nicholas did in the 1905 revolution, leaving hundreds dead and thousands homeless.
The almost immediate aftermath of 1881 was an enormous exodus of Jews from Russia, with most emigrants going to North America. The czar welcomed their departure; the rabbis, almost uniformly, opposed it, fearful of losing congregants and of the secularizing effects of American life. Later, one of Russia's prime ministers said he hoped that one-third of Russia's Jews would die of starvation, one-third would be converted and one-third would emigrate, leaving Russia essentially Judenrein (empty of Jews).
While life in North America was governed by principles of liberty, equality and opportunity, there were evident hardships. For some Jews, it was still frustrating to be part of a small, relatively powerless minority in an essentially alien and potentially hostile environment. Moreover, many realized that freedom brought its own problem – assimilation. Jews began re-thinking the problem: how they could retain their traditional customs, religion and languages while exercising their civil rights as free citizens in a significantly different cultural and religious environment. Back in Odessa, a physician, Judah Leib Pinsker, had the same disquieting thoughts.
For Pinsker, these ideas led to a dramatic transformation. Earlier he had been active in an assimilationist organization, advocating secular education for Jews, the use of the Russian language and the translation into Russian of Hebrew prayers.
In the 19th century, advocacy of a Jewish return to Zion had become a significant concept among some prominent non-Jews. This was, in part, motivated by the desire to rid their countries of Jews. When Theodor Herzl met with Alphonse Daudet, a noted writer and anti-Semite, Daudet supported the emigration of Jews to anywhere away from France. Others were prompted by unquestioned sympathy for Jews, sometimes combined with their own Christian views of a Jewish return as a prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus.
Important British statesmen and politicians, such as Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury, for humane reasons, advocated a Jewish homeland in Palestine long before the 1917 Balfour Declaration. A Canadian, Henry Wentworth Monk (1827-1896), a devout Christian who descended from distinguished British families on both his parents' sides, was an indefatigable worker and agitator for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, lobbying British and Canadian MPs and writing and distributing dozens of public appeals for the greater part of his life.
In the year after the pogroms, Pinsker anonymously published, in German, an impassioned pamphlet, Autoemancipation, subtitled "A Warning Addressed to His Brethren by a Russian Jew." Among Jews there was significant reaction, some positive, much strongly critical. Pinsker stated what remains the key Zionist principle: the only way to avoid the twin dangers of anti-Semitism and assimilation was by re-establishing a Jewish homeland, today increasingly meaningful by the growth of secularism in the West and by the sharply lower birth rates of Jewish communities, now facing potential demographic eradication.
During most of their history, Jews living in predominately Christian or Islamic countries could, at least in theory, relieve themselves of their "burden" of Jewishness by religious conversion. During the 19th century, it became increasingly clear that anti-Semitism had become a racist, not a religious ideology. Actually, this first happened in 16th-century Spain, when the Inquisition found that many Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism were still secretly practising their original faith. Jews had incontrovertible impure blood, the Inquisition concluded.
In the 19th century, biology's "survival of the fittest" doctrine and the new concept of genes were quickly absorbed into the growing racist ideology and eugenics, which later became the hallmark of Nazism. In the rest of Europe, although conversion may not have had the desired outcome of permitting converts full, untrammelled access to society, it was, nonetheless a way out, at least partially. Such distinguished Jews as the Mendelssohns, Heines, Mahlers and Disraelis successfully (more or less) crossed over from a Jewish identity to a Christian one, at least in a formal and documented manner.
Racist anti-Semitism was first publicly formalized in France with the publication by Count Gobineau (1853-1855) of a book about the natural superiority of white Christian Western Europeans. This idea was picked up in Germany by Wilhelm Marr, creator of the term "anti-Semitism."
Racist anti-Semitism was accompanied by a growing European nationalism, exemplified by the proclamation of the Second Reich in 1871 after Prussia had defeated Denmark, Austria and France, as well as by nationalists like Guissepe Mazzini (and the Risorgimento) in Italy and Charles Stewart Parnell in Ireland. Zionists were an outgrowth of the same nationalist force, with the additional deadly pressure placed on them by the precarious position of Jews in Europe.
This was the ideological climate when Pinsker published his "warning" anonymously. His authorship was soon discovered, however, and he was approached by a sympathetic group, Hibbat Ziyyon (Lovers of Zion), to become one of its leaders. In 1884, the organization convened a conference in Katowitz, Poland, the first Zionist congress, preceding the far more famous one in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, organized by Herzl.
Herzl, a moderately successful writer and journalist, came to the same conclusion as had Pinsker after witnessing rabidly anti-Semitic French mobs demonstrating after the false conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. The difference between Herzl and Pinsker was that Herzl, someone of moderately sufficient financial means, well-educated and, above all, confident, became indefatigable in his quest for a Jewish homeland. His choice, obviously, was Palestine, the original home of the Jewish people, the centre of its religious attachment and a land that had known a continuous Jewish presence from time immemorial. He interviewed important and significant people, from the kaiser to the Rothschilds. The bulk of those attending the 1897 Basel Congress were Jews of the Russian Empire. Herzl, while evidently sympathetic to the point of devotion to the Jewish cause, was also very much aware of image. He was personally impressive in stature, bearing, features, dress, etiquette and speech. For the majority of Jews attending the congress, Herzl, fearful of the impression they might make, ordered them to dress formally even if, in almost all cases, that meant renting clothes for the sessions.
In many ways remarkably different from Pinsker, Herzl never knew Hebrew or Yiddish; his language was German and, in a Zionist futurist novel, he conceived the new Jewish state as having German as its language and a monarchy as its form of government.
Pinsker died in 1891. His dream, under the impetus, organization and audacity that Herzl gave to it, and the Holocaust that necessitated it, finally became a reality in 1948.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic and writer living in New Westminster.
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