Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz

Radiant Clouds: The Literature of Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky in its Social Context (2015), she examines Jabotinsky’s psychology, political dreams, and creative ambitions, attempting to grasp his politics through his artistic imagination.¹⁵ By contrast, another Israeli scholar, Amir Goldstein, sees antisemitism as the unifying thread in Zionism and Antisemitism in the Thought and Action of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (2015).¹⁶ Daniel Heller, a Canadian scholar, recently published his dissertation, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism, which deals with the formation of Betar, the Revisionist youth group, and the popularity of Revisionism among Polish Jews in the 1930s.¹⁷

      Besides these books, there are several works devoted to the Israeli political right with major sections devoted to Jabotinsky’s role as inspiration or father figure. Among these books are Colin Shindler’s The Triumph of Military Zionism, Ami Podazhur’s The Triumph of Israel’s Radical Right, and Eran Kaplan’s The Jewish Radical Right.¹⁸ Recently, a debate broke out over the authorship of Jabotinsky’s texts and his use of pseudonyms. Leonid Katsis argues for a more generous incorporation of texts that might belong to Jabotinsky, whereas Alexander Frenkel criticizes the former’s approach.¹⁹

      My book differs from these. Unlike Natkovich, I set aside Jabotinsky’s dreams and concentrate on his Zionist writings, downplaying the gap between the writer and the politician. For me, the politician takes precedence. After all, if Jabotinsky had remained only a journalist and creative writer, he wouldn’t be the subject of a biography.²⁰ My project shares common elements with Amir Goldstein’s, but his concentration on antisemitism pushes him in a different direction. I follow Jabotinsky’s path in Zionism; to me, antisemitism is only a part of the picture. Additionally, most books about Israel’s radical right deal with the later period in Jabotinsky’s life, and see his rightward drift as inevitable. This approach examines his ideological endpoint and wants only to know “how he got there.” I see this approach as overdetermined. I emphasize the potentialities and contingencies of Jabotinsky’s life and the contradictions in his views, showing that his path was hardly unidirectional. Indeed, he entertained multiple and contradictory choices along the way, and his fate was hardly inevitable.

      Recently, scholars have become interested in Jabotinsky’s literary oeuvre and in the contrast between fiction and politics.²¹ In truth, his politics and creative writing rarely addressed the same themes at the same time. In this context, it is something of a conundrum that Jabotinsky wrote a novel (The Five) about tsarist Russia in the late 1930s, when the Nazis were gaining power in Europe and antisemitism was growing. However, while he was remembering the past, he became extremely active politically in the present. He withdrew his party from the World Zionist Organization and created the New Zionist Organization, and he negotiated with the Polish government to facilitate the mass evacuation of Polish Jewry.²² His newspaper articles in the last years of the 1930s concentrated on “evacuation,” which he defined as a strategically prudent act of retreat.²³

      Although Jabotinsky left Russia permanently in 1915, I have added two chapters on his relationships with Russians abroad and the story of the emigration of Jews and Russians from the Soviet Union. As I see it, the creation of a Revisionist Zionist Party in 1925 was entirely a Russian-Jewish phenomenon: its leaders and original members were Jews from Russia. Thus, the period 1915 to 1925 is part of my story. Even when Jabotinsky was outside its borders, Russia followed him everywhere: he established the Jewish Legion with colleagues from Russia, and the reason for a Legion was to entice the Jewish immigrants from Russia to volunteer for military service in Britain. In his Palestine period (1918 to 1920); in his work as a fundraiser for the Keren Hayesod; and as a member of the Zionist Executive, Jabotinsky was linked with Chaim Weizmann, another Jew from Russia. From 1920 to 1925, Jabotinsky befriended and worked with a group of Russian émigrés—Joseph Schechtman, Shlomo Gepstein, Alexander Kulisher, Yuly Brutskus, and Meir Grossman—in publishing Rassvet, the Russian-language newspaper. All were Zionists.

      Because the Russian chapter of Jabotinsky’s life did not end in 1925, I have added a postscript about Russian thematics, which played an important role in Jabotinsky’s later career. One might expect the Russia theme to vanish from Jabotinsk’s life in the 1930s, especially since he was busy with Revisionist party matters, but, surprisingly, he wrote a great deal about Russia, and with rose-tinted glasses. He idealized his friends and experiences, and painted a self-portrait of a moderate liberal, a person who stands for individual freedom, the democratic process, and minority rights. In his final years, Jabotinsky linked memories of Russia with his defense against charges of fascism. Russia symbolized a happier time, unlike the anxious present, when the Nazi threat loomed on a dark horizon.

      Nonetheless, the Revisionist party changed rapidly after it was officially established. Russian émigrés left its ranks, and Palestinian and Polish Jews joined, as Revisionism turned more radical. The story of Jabotinsky’s evolution after 1925 belongs to a different narrative. In this context, the trajectory and the chronological bookends of 1900 to 1925 make sense.

      The large and growing literature on Jabotinsky reveals enormous popular interest in him. Perhaps the fascination stems from the ideological parallels between the present-day Likud party and Jabotinsky.²⁴ Some journalists have linked Benjamin Netanyahu to Jabotinsky through Bibi’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, who was involved in the Revisionist movement. Benzion devoted a chapter in his book on Zionism to Jabotinsky.²⁵ Menachem Begin, also a Likud forefather, invoked Jabotinsky to enhance his own political legitimacy, although one should acknowledge that Begin distorted Jabotinsky’s image to serve his own interests.²⁶

      For many Israelis today, Jabotinsky’s greatest achievement was the establishment of a Zionism of the political right.²⁷ Likudniks like to recall that Jabotinsky opposed Mapai (socialism) and promoted capitalist investment to expand Jewish employment. Jabotinsky disliked the Histadrut (labor exchange), so he established a parallel Revisionist labor exchange. As early as the mid-1920s, Jabotinsky rejected labor strikes in Palestine, arguing that they frightened away investment. When workers brought legitimate grievances, Jabotinsky suggested arbitration, his reasoning being that the Yishuv was a society in the making: at this early point in its development, it simply couldn’t endure economic dislocations caused by class conflict.

      History has been both generous and cruel to Jabotinsky. Generous in that there is an institute devoted entirely to his legacy in Tel Aviv, and numerous scholars are occupied with him. Cruel because, even though he is remembered, it is often not for what he accomplished, but primarily for what he has signified for Israeli politics in the years since his death.²⁸

      Notes

      1.Brian Horowitz, “Was Vladimir Jabotinsky a ‘Good’ Politician?,” Frankel Center Yearbook, 2012.

      2.Jan Zouplna, “Revisionist Zionism: Image Reality and the Quest for Historical Narrative,” Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 1 (2008): 5.

      3.Vladimir Jabotinsky, Fel’etony (St. Petersburg, 1913), 264–274.

      4.Dvora Hacohen, “British Immigration Policy to Palestine in the 1930s: Implications for Youth Aliyah,” Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 4 (October 2001): 216.

      5.For example, Katzir: Kovets le-korot ha-tenuah ha-tsionit be-rusya, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1964); Yizhak Maor, Ha-Tenuah ha-tsionit be-rusya (Jerusalem: Magnes & Hebrew University, 1986); Yossi Goldshtein, Bin tsionut medinit le-tsionut ma’asit: Ha-tenuah ha-tsionit be-rusya ba-reshitah (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991).

      6.Patricia Herlihy, “Port Jews of Odessa and Trieste: A Tale of Two Cities,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow Institut II (2003): 183–198; Steven J. Zipperstein, “Odessa,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershom Hundert, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008): 1277–1282.

      7.Joseph B. Schechtman, The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956); Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, 2 vols. (New York: Barricade Books, 1996).

      8.Vladimir Jabotinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Minsk: Met,