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July 28, 2006
Szold was Zionism's first heroine
The young Hungarian-American woman was passionate about establishing
a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
EUGENE KAELLIS
If, after 1859, when he had assumed his position as rabbi for Baltimore's
German-speaking congregation, Hungarian-born Benjamin Szold and
his wife had had a boy instead of a girl, things would have turned
out very differently for the first of their five daughters.
From the start, Henrietta Szold became her father's closest "associate."
Bright and studious, with English as her first language, but soon
adept at German, Hebrew and French, Henrietta spent hour after hour
alone with her father in his study, going over his books and papers.
She did the research for his sermons and articles and edited them,
precociously becoming his able "assistant," totally attached
to this kindly, scholarly man and serving him lovingly in a pattern
that would repeat itself for much of her life.
She was valued by the men she later served at the Jewish Publication
Society and New York's Jewish Theological Seminary as a capable,
reliable, meticulous worker whose forte was detail and organization,
someone they could - and did - overwork and underpay and never seriously
consider for positions of leadership and responsibility.
Years later, it was her collaboration with Louis Ginzberg that brought
this pattern of relationship to a head and then dramatically ended
it. The Russian-born Ginzberg came to the seminary destined to become
the bastion of the emerging Conservative Judaism movement.
Among the firmament of New York's top Jewish theological, historical
and literary luminaries, Ginzberg's star may have been the brightest.
Among his many works, the monumental Legends of the Jews, the Judaic
counterpart to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, has outstanding
literary, historical and psychological significance.
For Szold, their close – and eventual daily – collaboration
was a recapitulation of her wonderfully satisfying relationship
with her late father, the major difference being that she was 13
years older than Ginzberg and lacked the physical attractiveness
he valued. The more intense her love for him became, the more she
hid it. Brilliant as he was, the desensitizing power of his ego,
the deliberate use of his considerable charm as a virtuoso instrument
on which he played cadenzas of attraction, her love for him went
as unnoticed as the flaws in his personality. Szold was totally
engaged in essentially adolescent romantic fantasies. She was sure
he loved her – not as much as she loved him, no one could –
but nonetheless certain of his intention to marry her.
Then Ginzberg went to Europe and returned engaged to Adele Katzenstein,
an attractive young Berliner 10 years his junior. The pair's wedding
was for Szold more than a disappointment: it was a personal tragedy
of epic proportions. The years following Ginzberg's betrayal, as
she saw it, resulted in her frequent and often unseemly public displays
of self-pity, self-derogation, humiliation and anger.
Finally, little by little, she overcame her flashes of anger, regret
and shame, interspersed with periods of torpor, and started putting
her considerable talents and energy to work for Zion, helping to
organize a public health nursing system in Palestine – then
a squalid, neglected and decaying backwater of the declining Ottoman
Empire.
Szold, influenced by Leo Pinsker's auto-emancipation, had become
a Zionist even before the publication of Theodor Herzl's Judenstaat.
Zionism itself had been an insignificant factor among Western European
and North American Jews, with whatever small support it had coming
from Jews of the Russian Empire. Jews had never achieved the rights
of others under the czars, but the assassination of Alexander II
in 1881 made matters much worse. His successors, Alexander III and
Nicholas II, the last of the czars, were more aggressively anti-Semitic,
fomenting pogroms by the Black Hundreds, ultra-reactionary thugs
who killed Jewish men, women and children, raped the women and burned
down Jewish homes and businesses.
The North American Jewish community, made up largely of German-speaking
Jews who had fled Europe after the failure of the 1848 revolutions,
was rapidly being overwhelmed by Ostjuden (eastern Jews):
poor, desperate, poorly educated, Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox religious
or politically radical Jews who didn't "fit in" to the
prosperous, well-assimilated, educated, reform-minded North American
Jews of German cultural background. Many, with their long hair and
beards, in their kaftans, bekonfit and tzitzit, speaking Yiddish
with their hands as much as their mouths, were an embarrassment.
The socialist-minded among them, while often having a better secular
education, presented just as much of a threat at a time when American
labor was locked in a series of often violent disputes over important
issues – for example, the eight-hour work day.
At first, the Jewish community tried to ignore the Russians. But
when it became evident that they wouldn't go away and it might take
some generations to change their ways, they became the objects of
intense, if not assimilationist, then integrationist, pressure from
Jewish immigrant aid organizations. It was, indeed, the only practical
thing to do.
Szold, even as a young woman, became active in organizing and providing
education for those Russian Jews who came to Baltimore. She learned
to admire their passion, which contrasted sharply with the staid
respectability of her father's congregation – and learned also
to face what many Jews considered the inevitable dilemma of the
Diaspora: assimilation or anti-Semitism. To some, the only solution
was Zionism.
America's entry into the First World War in 1917 posed some difficult
decisions for Szold. Undoubtedly, she was influenced by the German-speaking
environment in which she had grown up. While the Wilhelmine Reich
still had persistent anti-Semitism, much of it was social, rather
than government policy. One of its major allies, however, the Czarist
Empire, was officially anti-Jewish and supported increasingly violent
attacks on Jews.
Moreover, Szold was inclined toward pacificism. Some of the top
leadership in the American Zionist movement were extremely uncomfortable
with the consequences of her position and they exacted from her
silence – although not an abandonment of her role.
Things changed remarkably when Chaim Weizmann, the world's leading
Zionist, markedly improved Britain's weapons capability by inventing
a practical way to produce a chemical necessary for the production
of explosives. Weizmann's charm and influence, reinforced by a hefty
portion of realpolitik regarding Britain's interest in the Suez
Canal and her efforts to keep Russia out of the Middle East, induced
British Prime Minister Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur
Balfour, in spite of the opposition of vigorously anti-Zionist British
Jewry, to issue the heartening but vague declaration regarding the
ultimate establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
When Gen. Allenby's troops entered Jeru-salem a month later, this
declaration, deliberately fuzzy as it was about final intent and
time, was a piece of the promise that Herzl had been unable to wrest
from the kaiser or sultan.
After the Central Powers' capitulation and the placement of Palestine
under a British League of Nations mandate, Szold continued her work
in Palestine indefatigably. It was not only physically, mentally
and emotionally draining – she had to deal with sharply contending
factions in a struggle characterized by intrigue, irrepressible
egos, ideological differences, contagious apathy, sheer laziness
and the tendency of the largest donor, the United States, to run
things in Palestine – which was not to the liking of the Jews
living and working there.
Best remembered for transforming Hadassah into an international
women's Zionist movement, Szold was never, in the usual sense, a
charismatic figure, largely because she didn't want to be. Her efforts
were directed toward being practical and just, and in these she
succeeded remarkably well. She died in Jerusalem in 1943, when the
war was at its turning point. News of the Holocaust had finally
filtered out, but its full extent was still unknown. Only the most
optimistic could hope for the establishment of a Jewish state in
the next several years.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
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