Doctors as Zionist visionaries

DR. FRANK HEYNICK SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Although it's not widely known, the fulfilment of the Zionist dream came about in large measure through the efforts of medical doctors. And not just in their helping to create a healthy physical environment for the new inhabitants. For, aside from such pragmatic matters, Jewish medical doctors in Europe in the decades around the turn of the 20th century were among the great visionaries, inspiring their coreligionists to re-establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The attraction of various Jewish doctors to the Zionist cause depended not just on their individual personalities and backgrounds, but also on the situations in their respective times and places.

It was in Russia in 1882 - when things were going from bad to worse under the ultrareactionary and bigoted Czar Alexander III - that a Jewish physician in Odessa, Leo Pinsker, published his book Autoemancipation. Analyzing the psychological and social roots of anti-Jewish hatred and the prospects for assimilation, he concluded that Jews must take it upon themselves to reclaim their ancestral land. Pinsker inspired the First Aliyah, bringing some 25,000 Eastern European Jews to Palestine between 1882 and 1904.

In the 1890s, the Budapest-born Parisian neurologist Dr. Max Nordau was shocked at the outpouring of anti-Jewish venom when the French army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason he didn't commit. Himself a quite unconventional social philosopher, rather removed from his religious roots, Nordau was nevertheless drawn to Theodor Herzl's Zionist dream and he went on to head the World Zionist Organization in the early years of the 20th century. Nordau's followers expressed more and more the ideals of national rebirth in medical metaphors. "In a sick Jewry, Zionism is the will to live," rang one cry.

Throughout most of history, hatred of Jews was, strictly speaking, not anti Semitism. Folks of Jewish descent who accepted baptism could in fact usually expect to be accepted with open arms by their Christian coreligionists. But Austria early in the 20th century saw the increasing rise of "racial" anti-Semitism against those of Jewish ancestry, regardless of their religion. The radiologist Dr. Ignaz Zollschan was particularly dismayed by this phenomenon. He became a leading light in the Zionist organization Binyan ha-Aretz (Building of the Land) and pushed for the immediate establishment of Jewish towns, farms and businesses in Palestine.

In Berlin, the dermatologist Felix Theilhaber was initially not so much concerned with racial anti-Semitism. (This was still before the First World War and the subsequent hyperinflation and economic depression, when Germany's woes would lead to the scapegoating of those of Jewish descent by rabid nationalists.) Rather, Theilhaber bemoaned, in his book Sterile Berlin, the irony that Jewish emancipation and assimilation into German society was leading to voluntary extinction as the Jews lost the "categorical imperative of Judaism" to procreate, or else removed themselves from the community through mixed marriages and conversion.

Although himself not of Orthodox background, Theilhaber's visit to the Holy Land in 1906 was an almost mystical experience that turned him into a tireless propagandizer for Zionism as a potential salvation of the Jewish people. "I had seen the land of my fathers," he later wrote. "It was full of old stones and not one cedar, but for me, eretz Yisrael was no longer an empty concept, but a reality, a piece of earth whose magic power I was never able to shake off."

Theilhaber's description indicates how much had yet to be done to reclaim the land, create a healthy environment and build a sound medical infrastructure. Fortunately, the Zionist medical visionaries at the turn of the 20th century didn't quite have to start from scratch. Others had done some down-to-earth work before them.

In 1843, Sir Moses Montifiore had brought to Palestine - with its mostly Arab population living under highly unsanitary conditions and plagued by cholera, malaria and other diseases - a physician from Upper Silesia, Dr. Simon Frankel, to treat the small Jewish population. The following year, Frankel became head of the first hospital in the Holy Land since the Crusades. For the next eight decades, steady progress was made in establishing hospitals and health services, thanks in large measure to the generosity of the Rothschild and Hirsch families.

By the eve of the First World War, Jerusalem alone had 19 hospitals, most of them under Jewish auspices. With the transfer of Palestine from Ottoman Turkish rule to British mandate status and the issuing of the Balfour declaration, bodies such as the Hadassah Medical Organization went into action. Malaria was eradicated, sanitation was improved and a network of rural dispensaries and town clinics was built up along with more new hospitals for providing services for the state-in-making. Eminent physicians were among those fleeing to Palestine from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Among the casualties of Israel's War of Independence in 1948 were some 80 civilian doctors and nurses who were ambushed on their way to the Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus. The inheritors of a century of Zionist medical idealism and hard work, they made the ultimate sacrifice for the new Jewish state.

Dr. Frank Heynick is the N.Y.-based author of the forthcoming book Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga.

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